I… don’t think you know what ddossing means but okay.

Would it really be very easy? Especially considering once instances find your doing that, they just block you? Would it be worth people’s time?

Is there any way around this, perhaps querying a global repository of federated instances and sorting them by popularity?

In all honesty, you don’t have a point. If you did, third-party services already wouldn’t offer this. Seeing as they can, it’s clearly possible.

Thank you for sharing this!

since anyone can start an instance, when you search “all”, where should it search?

Easy! It should search all the servers your server is federated with! Servers should contain a list of their community names that can be easily and quickly queried by other servers.

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.

Oh yes, it really is.

The implementation may not be easy, but the concept is very simple.

Uh… no it’s not.

I’m sorry, but what you’re doing is actively making this service harder to use by suggesting that ‘all’ should only mean ‘the communities other community members have subscribed to that contain that string.’

Where do the community members even find the the ones to subscribe to? Oh, they use a third-party service or ‘just know’ because… whatever reason.

Gee, fediverse design strikes again. Sorry, it has to be said. It really does.

‘All’ to me means “”“all”“” the servers my instance can connect to that contain that string.

It’s a very simple concept.