Pleroma calls their equivalent of "All" the "Known Network" instead, which does a better job explaining what will show up there in my opinion.

totally understand the frustration, and i’m not going to try and invalidate it!

… however, it’s definitely not a problem with a simple solution

since anyone can start an instance, when you search “all”, where should it search? i don’t mean generally like “all the instances”, i mean where specifically? things like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, kbin.social, etc are obvious… but what about lemmy.mydomainforfriends.social (not real but let’s pretend someone created their own little instance for friends there!)?

let’s say you say yes that should be searched, okay… how does your instance know it’s there? does it tell all other instances that it exists at some point? where does IT get that list from? (the current solution to this is that your instance starts to “know about” an instance after someone interacts with it, but this has the problem you’ve described)

let’s say that instance shouldn’t be searched… now, what are the rules (automatic id assume; not with human intervention) that would allow an instance to be added to some big list somewhere? also where is that list? now we’re back at problem 1: how do you store a federated list of servers?

the problem gets even harder when you consider mastodon, pixelfed, peertube, etc… all these services interact: should all include them? only certain things in them?

What does 'All' mean to you?

In this context it means all posts which are stored on the server you are on. And only things are stored which people subscribed to. It does not mean "‘all’ servers".

There are good reasons why the protocol has been designed like that, if you're interested then you can find out about it. If not, reddit still exists for people who like it more.

It's a massive usability issue and a massive content discovery issue, imo.

For lemmy users who got lucky and had their first lemmy experience on a top 5 instance where a lot of popular off-instance communities are already subscribed to, then users would see a huge list of both local and foreign communities. For users who got unlucky and had their first lemmy experience on a small instance, their view of "all" looks like a ghost town.

Part of the problem is semantical. If they are going to call it "all" then it should really be all (all lemmy communities available on all federated instances). If it isn't going to actually show everything, then they should call it something else that indicates it's only local communities plus whatever local users are subscribed to.

Just bringing this to everyone's awareness, the issues is already tracked here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951

From the Lemmy devs

I think the lemmy-ui's could very much benefit from a "global community discovery service" like https://browse.feddit.de , but integrated into the front ends. I'd of course prefer that each lemmy back-end do their own crawling of communities and instances, to make it as distributed as possible.

The simple explanation is your instance doesn’t “know” what’s out there. lemmy.world doesn’t know when lemmy.ml adds a community, and it doesn’t know when hypothetical.server pops up as a new instance. There’s not really a good way of knowing that without having a central repository, which defeats the purpose of a centralized platform.

One thing you can do is use Lemmy Explorer to search for communities on other instances and subscribe to them. This will fill up All for everyone on your instance.

Omg I didn't know this! Though I did wonder why my "all" feed seemed to empty.

Someone will implement it.

The protocol itself is decentralized. Which is good.

If a app wants to use a central service to search thats a option available to them.

TIL. That explains why I couldn't find some things.

Forgive what is probably a silly naive question...

Can someone point me to an explanation of the federated architecture of lemmy? I haven't found one yet that has helped me build a good mental model. I either get a step-by-step startup guide, or discussions on the merrits/demerits of a distributed system.

I think I've pieced together that it's basically independent "instances" of the machine each with their own communities within. Sort of like if there were multiple instances of reddit, each with its own r/aww or whatever. I don't yet understand, however how these interact/relate/ovelap/collaborate...which I think is the basis for this thread.

All you need to do is subscribe to it yourself. You don't need to rely on someone else. You can find the place with the search feature on your own, then subscribe so it starts getting pulled in all.

https://www.search-lemmy.com