Any post and community could be accessed through a theoretically limitless amount of instances, which also means a theoretically limitless amount of URLs.
Will this hinder Lemmy from ever coming into the mainstream? If I type any topic in Google, I will get a reddit thread that deals with that. Can something like that ever happen for Lemmy?
I think so, at least compared to more centralised sites, since there’s no index or aggregator that concentrates that information in a place that can be easily accessible.
Unlike some place like Reddit, I can’t just stick “Lemmy” or “site:lemmy.ml” on the end of my link, and expect that I would be able to get all the information across all the instances. At best, I would be able to search for what’s contained within an individual instance, but that’s about it, which makes it more trouble to search for things, since you have to know the server and community you’re looking for first.
What’s contained within an individual instance is whatever’s viewable from that instance, though, as remote content is mirrored locally. So, any early instance that is well federated and subscribed to a large number of remote communities should work well as a search target.
So site:lemmy.ml actually shouldn’t end up being too and of a query.