By now I’ve mostly (I think) gotten used to some of Lemmy’s quirks, but one caught me a little off guard a moment ago related to the search. Admittedly I was trying to be a little lazy, but I think that’s fortuitous as many likely take this approach.
I was trying to search to see if a video was posted here before posting it, as I try to avoid making repeat posts especially in the same community.
So I went to search with the default search settings, copied the video’s url into the search and ran it.
Despite the default search type being All, which I think many would expect to include searching by all types (posts/comments/communities/users/url), it seems to exclude url. I found this out as I saw only one comment with the video url and no posts, and so went ahead and posted only to see afterward all the cross-posts to other communities.
In a similar way, searching with the All setting for communities feels clunky, as if one searches by a community name without an exclamation mark, it will only show up as mentioned in comments (if it’s been mentioned). There’s no sort of fuzzy search to have a direct link to the community display in the results.
These are just a couple stumbling blocks in the default web UI that have been around for awhile, but caught my attention again.
It seems to work fine, maybe its because your instance is outdated.
I checked on a different up to date instance (lemm.ee) knowing that, and confirmed it was federated with the relevant community, but didn’t see those results.
Strangely enough I can’t replicate similar results searching lemmy.ml either, so not sure what’s going on. 🤔
Are you logged in on those instances? Resolving a community name like that requires a network request, if you are not logged in it doesnt work.
Aah, that may explain it! I thought it might be best to check logged out for a better sense of how search worked, so was searching logged out.