At minimum, the Instance installer guides and documentation needs to reflect that your own server doing real-time searches should be a conscious choice.
Lemmy.ml is erroring out already on searches, GitHub issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3296
And if I’m seeing things right, 0.18 changed the loging from 0.17 where searching for a community https://lemmy.ml/communities now does a full-text posting/comment search? It gives a ton of output I don’t want, and it’s hitting the database even harder. Instead of just searching a single database table, now it is going into comments and postings.
Reddit was legendary for not having their own in-build comment and posting search engine up to date - and also used PostgreSQL (at least they did when still open source). It is a huge amount of data and I/O processing.
The problem is, at least in v0.17.x, searching for a community url or bang-prefixed community name returns nothing when you constrain the “type” drop-down to “communities”. Now, that feels pretty clearly like a bug to me… if you search community-types by url, it should return the correct result.
But if that couldn’t be fixed for v0.18.0 due to time/priority constraints, defaulting to searching “all” types is a reasonable workaround even if it makes little sense absent the above context. At least until searching for communities by url is fixed.
I’d rather no results, than a massive list of incorrect results of a type I’m not searching for… ie comments/posts rather than communities.