SDF is defederated from thelemmy.club. When an SDF user searches specifically for !mildlyinfuriating@thelemmy.club or !Android@thelemmy.club, the search tool gives “no results”.
This is a user-hostile act. Refusing the inform the user is an assault on the user’s dignity. We know the community exists. What happens when the Lemmy server is proactively defederated with is that it will not connect to the defederated node even to check if a community exists. That’s all fair enough. But the user should be informed. Not just that the node is defederated but also the rationale. That’s necessary for respecting the user’s dignity. It’s disrespectful to the user to regard them as unworthy of information.
What should happen
The search tool should respond with:
“Unable to verify the existence of !mildlyinfuriating on thelemmy.club because thelemmy.club is defederated. The reason it is defederated is: ‘the host is mismanaged by pro-Trumper bootlicking nutters’” (for example – whatever the admin wants to enter).
Bonus points for overachievers
It would be extra useful if the Lemmy backend could periodically grab a dataset from a directory service like Lemmyverse. It could then use that information to perform better and give better information. The search tool could then say “the community exists according to our records, but …”
I recall that some software supported that and some did not (lemmy vs kbin vs piefed… mastodon). mildseason wrote that Lemmy would have to gather info it does not have, which led me to think Lemmy was one of the pkgs that neglected the disclosure feature.
In the case of sdf, thelemmy.club is not on the blocked instance list. So there is a different problem with SDF. Which is exactly why it is important for the software to inform the user when a search for a fully qualified community name fails.
Thelemmy.club is actually listed on the federated instances list. It looks like your admins have chosen to explicitly block those communities in particular. I’m not clear on the details, but I’ve not been hearing good things about the sdf lemmy (not sdf in general). You might want to consider a different instance with more transparent admin.