I've been on the Fediverse for a little while now, but I'm only getting into Lemmy now. I've noticed that it is very cumbersome to follow communities from other instances. You have to click on search, select "Communities", enter the name (but without the instance), find the correct one in the list if there's multiple and then subscribe.

Why can't I just... enter the fully qualified name somewhere and it sends me to the community directly? Why is there no search that works for unique IDs (like in Mastodon, where you can search for any global object ID (URL) to navigate there directly)? Or does that exist and I haven't found it yet?

Another thing, is there an existing effort for browser extensions that allow interactions when viewing foreign communities through their own interface instead of your home instances? This exists for Mastodon for example and is really convenient (I can like, boost, follow on other instances as long as I'm logged in on my home instance).

Edit: The regular search seems to be working with fully qualified names/IDs for me now. Dunno if it was just a fluke before or a problem with the instance I was looking up.

Edit 2: Searching IDs (such as https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse) work (although it takes a while to load), whereas searching "names" like [email protected] doesn't. I don't know if it's because of my instance or not.

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[–] frankblack 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yea not so great agreed. Maybe it’s because it has to go through the federation?

[–] marsara9 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So the default search that's built into the site is quite, well primitive. It does an implicit AND between all of the search terms, and the order of the search terms matter.

If anyone can do development though, I'm working on an improved search engine and need contributors still: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search

[–] frankblack 5 points 1 year ago

Interesting stuff. Search function. But I wonder if we can incorporate your neat search function into an app like wefwef or mlem? But maybe you can fork it? Sorry I’m not a dev but engineer and cyber professional. So if you think I can help in that realm, be happy to!