this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
111 points (97.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36446 readers
1450 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Generically, with site:programming.dev, replace with your own instance.

But it assumes two things:

  1. That the instance is indexed by google.
  2. That the answer is actually there.

You may need to try a different instance for 1, but 2 is not really solvable.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

But what about all instances?

2 is solvable if this search is possible.

What brought me to make this post was how do I simply find the answer to "best lemmy app android"?

I know how to find the answer but it would be nice to search all lemmy instances with such generic questions.

Is there a possibility of site:instance1|instance2|instance3 or similar? Maybe site:*lemmy* [question at hand]

Obviously that's pseudocode but I hope it helps understand what I'm asking.

If at all possible if you could run this in incognito container it would be even better. You never know if a blocked user posted something valuable lol

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 days ago

You might try searxng, though due to the way federation works, that's not really necessary. All you need to do is search one of the more federated instances like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or lemmy.sdf.org and you will pull up anything that server has seen related to your search. User blocks aren't really an issue, since you don't need to be logged in. The only time searching multiple instances would be helpful is if you know the post originally might have come from an instance that doesn't widely federate or is heavily blocked from federation.

Also I've seen quite a few folks from lemmy.ca so you might try your instance's own search. It will usually search federated content as well as local content.

The main issue though is like @[email protected] suggested. Lemmy is young, it doesn't have nearly 20 years of back archives that you can search nor the huge user base that Reddit had to create such a rich back archive. It's getting there, but it is a problem only time and usage of Lemmy will solve.

As for the best Lemmy app, You might give Voyager a go. I use it on iOS and have been quite happy with it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

rust (site:programming.dev | site:lemmy.world)

That seemed to work, I guess you could keep appending instances?

Its just google, so no user specific impact.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

Here is my attempt in a separate post:

https://mander.xyz/post/7198692

I feel like though if you put too much site filters, results might be reduced in an unexpected way (like searching "X" thing on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml might produce fewer results than searching "X" on lemmy.world only)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Your instance holds a copy of the information, so just use your instance url. Unless your instance is down, in which case you should not use your instance url