Yes, with a major caveat. An instance will search only communities that at least one user on the instance is subscribed to and only as far back as the time the first user on the instance subscribed to the community.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Lemmynet's design structure has some weird choices in it, motivated either by laziness or to keep garage servers from being overwhelmed, and that's the biggest and weirdest one. I'd like to see federation = full and complete synchonization from server launch to present, but I doubt the motivation is there to implement it. Maybe things will be different when kbin eventually surpasses Lemmy
Interesting, can you explain a little more? I'm very curious.
I'd say the short answer is no and the long answer is yes.
Searching across instances is difficult, for the reason RandomBit mentioned in this thread. But you don't go to reddit and expect your search results to include Hacker News, Twitter, etc. When you search on reddit, it also only searches the local instance, it just is that there is only one instance. So the search is exactly the same as reddit.
With that said, there is probably room for a service that provides cross-instance search by subscribing and indexing communities like a crawler, rather than relying on users to create the federation.
FediSearch I guess is similar to your idea, though I think the goal would be to make a new and open search index specifically containing fediverse websites instead of just using Google. I also feel like the formatting should be more like Lemmy, with the particular post title and short description showing instead of the generic search UI.
The idea of a fediverse search is really cool though. If things like news and academic papers ever got their own fediverse-connected service, I could see a FediSearch being a great alternative to the AI sludge of Google.
Not yet, I don't think
Any web search seaches Lemmy as well. Just seach for your user ID or display name to find your own content.
I guess what I want to learn is that if I were to type into Google “what are the best iPhone games Reddit” I would get a bunch of Reddit threads does the same thing work if I were to end the question and “lemmy”
That would be the question. You can certainly do a site search. At least duckduckgo can do that. It may not be so easy to just search lemmy, the threadiverse, or the fediverse for example. Do not know.
Probably if the instances have lemmy in their domains like mine, or lemmy.ml, lemmy.ca, or in their name (mine is "pe1uca's lemmy" so if the domain was different maybe search engines could also work with that), but not for ones like, lemmit.online, sh.itjust.works which don't have lemmy neither in their names nor domain.
It'd be like searching for content posted in sites which use wordpress.
Give it a try and let us know.
I think the different domains and levels of federation makes it less convenient. Personally, I think the Fediverse should collaborate on a shared wiki for community knowledge and whatnot.