So we were aware they weren't completely extinct since we were keeping a few around? The title makes it seem like it just popped up and was a complete surprise.

You should look into ReVanced :)

Interesting. I hadn't even thought about how the fact that instance1.[post] and instance2.[post@instance1] is essentially the same thing and how search engines would handle it. Interested in what you come up with!

I imagine that would be quite inconvenient... Especially as Lemmy grows and has potentially many more instances.

But what if the post I'm searching for is not on lemmy.world? Say the instance doesn't even have Lemmy in their name, like beehaw.org. How would a search engine index it? How would it know it's part of Lemmy?