Thanks for the explanation. I assumed most of that already, but it's nice to have a clearer picture. My main complaint here is that it should be extremely clear to the user what is happening. If it's fetching data it should say so. If that is going to take minutes or hours, it should say so. Because right now "no results" is meaningless. It could mean it doesn't exist, it could mean it's going to load in 3 seconds, or it could mean it will never load. And this is between two servers that are both on 0.18.3 (I was using sopuli.xyz and discuss.tchncs.de for testing). Actually, if I search for !vinyl@sopuli.xyz on tchncs.de right now, it doesn't show up. I wait and wait and it never shows. But it is clearly cached on the server because you can visit it directly via discuss.tchncs.de/c/vinyl@sopuli.xyz.

It needs improvements badly and I would say the same improvements should happen for a direct link. Instead of erroring out, it should query the remote server (or provide an option to do so) and tell the user to check back if it's loading.