It’s excruciatingly obnoxious to have to rely on third party sources for what should be a first-party feature.
Like, I select all and then search a query. “Oh no, nobody on your server used a third party service to find it, so you won’t see it here.”
Like, how short-sighted is that, really? If I search for a string in the ‘all’ servers, I should have a list of ‘all’ the servers containing that string.
It’s a really simple concept. Not sure why this post even has to be made, but I’m wondering if there’s something I can do to make these ‘features’ more intuitive.
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.
It should be able to search a list of communities available on other servers its federated with.
This would be a very simple feature to implement and should not cause significant overhead.