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Is Lemmy searchable like reddit?
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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Technology
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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.