Because of changes in how the lemmy API works I had to abandon the project awhile back.

The GitHub page is still up and if anyone wants to take over they’re more than welcome. But the project would need a complete rewrite in order to function and even then there’d still be limitations.

Think of Lemmy as email. Each post or comment is just an email sent to a distribution group (a community). If your email server goes down, all of those users and distribution groups are gone. Now I’ll still have the emails I sent to you in my email box but you won’t be able to see them as your email server is offline. Sure you could create a new account on a new server but you’d have to tell everyone about your new address (federate) but there’s nothing to associate your old user with your new one and there’s no way to backfill data. I could reply-all or forward (comment) on to your new address but there’s still no way to associate those old posts with your new account.

If an instance goes down (permanently), federation of all of the communities hosted by that instance essentially stop. The content that has already been posted remains but anything new added to those communities only remain on your home instance. The only way for federation to resume is for that instance to come back online with the same domain it started with.

There is a public API now. While I won’t support sorting, you can process and do what you will with the results as-is. Currently I only support Posts and Communities for now.

When you search for posts you’re just matching against the title or body. For communities it’s searching the posts within that community.

There’s also more filters now with: instance/community/author/since/until and a safe-search option.

So I’m not sure how close this comes to your idea but I thought I’d share.

Yep. The idea is that the instance you select is the instance that all links will open up in. This way once you find a post you’re looking for you don’t have to find it on your home instance and can immediately start replying, save it for later, subscribe to the community, etc…

Edit: I do plan on “fixing” this eventually, but I’m waiting on a bugfix on lemmy itself. You can see more here: https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/issues/20

Just pushed a new update, that should fix an issue with the home-instance selector. Since you’re on lemmy.world I’d suggest selecting that instance from the drop-down and trying your search again…

Check out my post history.

But https://www.search-lemmy.com. It has a few bugs but it should work for you. Especially if you set your home instance to something large like Lemmy.world.

Edit: if you want to help contribute: https://www.github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search

Thanks. It shouldn’t be long before I start considering the APIs stable enough that I can maybe reach out to the 3rd party app devs and then maybe who knows…

Make sure you select your home instance from the drop-down.

I’ve got an outstanding bug where first time users are defaulting to an obscure / small instance that doesn’t have much content.

https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/issues/45

Not sure if this helps but : https://www.search-lemmy.com/find-communities/results?query=Learn+instance%3Aprogramming.dev&page=1

Still working for me. You might need to clear your browser cache as I did make some UI changes as part of the update.

Eventually it will. But there’s a bug preventing global search working in lemmy itself. You can see more of the details here (https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/issues/20 )

One of my primary goals with this is that users MUST be able to open a given link in their home instance so that they can then interact / reply / subscribe, etc… without having to figure out how to find said post themselves. So with that requirement, users MUST select a home instance but because of the before-mentioned bug I can’t show posts that your instance isn’t aware of.

Here’s the landing page if you just go to https://www.search-lemmy.com/. I’m assuming that drop-down that you’re referring to is your home instance selector. Since you’re on lemmy.world I suggest you set that to well, lemmy.world. Then you can do your search and all of the results will take you directly to that post on lemmy.world (or whatever you set as your home instance).

Now you can also see that Find Communities button in the top right, you can click on it and it’ll take you to a similar page but instead of returning posts for search results, it will return a list of communities, based on how many matches it found. (as if you did a search on the normal page but instead just counted the number of results per community).

https://www.search-lemmy.com/find-communities/results?query=camping&page=1

It’s under the “Find Communities” button at the top of the screen. If you don’t see that button, try clearing your browser cache.

Just added a new feature that lets you search but it returns the number of matches per community. So you should be able to use that to find the most active communities based on your search result.

some query community:!ultralight@lemmy.world would search your community. Now, if this community is less than 24hrs old, it may not have been indexed yet, so you may just need to wait a day or so.

I just tested with https://www.search-lemmy.com/results?query=test+community%3A!ultralight%40lemmy.world&page=1 I was able to at least find 2 posts.