220
To see it in action:
Crust.piefed.social (the Piefed development instance)
Not all instances implement it yet, I guess it depends how often they pull from the dev branch
Example of search for 'movies'
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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Ah, that makes sense. I'll try to pay attention to which I'm doing, because my most recent search used only comments, but was absolutely useless.
Yeah anything that involves comments doesn't work so well - either them specifically or the combination of them and posts. And tbf it does retrieve the results of the query, it is only the sort options that fail miserably.
I've used Lemmy now for >2 years and the excuse that "it's still in development" has very much worn thin when no changes at all have been made to this or so many other issues with it.
At least the search function is still better than Reddit's! (Obligatory and reflexive fuck spex:-P)
I actually don't agree. This is one area where Reddit's centralised nature is a benefit, because it makes it super easy for Google to index and return results. On-site search isn't great on Reddit, but at least Googling for stuff from Reddit works really well.
Yes I meant the on-site one developed by Reddit, but agreed that the centralized nature lends itself towards searching by Google.
Although the other way opens up a huge can of worms since every large, general-purpose instance will - due to the nature of how the ActivityPub protocol works - have basically all of the content of the entire Threadiverse. Or as near to that as it works for a first approximation anyway, e.g. someone deciding to index all content appearing on "Lemmy.World" would get all the memes, movie discussions, etc., missing chiefly things like piracy and anarchy and other things that LW has decided to ban. It won't be "correct" in the sense of attribution to the OP, but once someone found their way to the content housed on LW they are but a click away from getting to its original source anyway. So from that standpoint, Google indexing I would naively have thought would not be all that difficult? Except for the increasingly niche content that isn't federated with the largest instances, which is perhaps desirable anyway to not expose mainstream normies to content calling for e.g. actual murder in response to world events (such as occurs routinely on e.g. Hexbear).
A safer, sanitized version of the Threadiverse that is searchable by anyone works to all of our advantage, I would believe?