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 …”

  • evenwichtOP
    13·
    29 天前

    It’s kind of a futile exercise because even if you could search communities on a defederated instance

    It’s not about the server making extra connections. The search failed to get results given a specific community name and location. The software knows why it failed. It is neglecting to pass that info on to the user. Giving specific error feedback is the sort of task that should be an automatic assumption when writing code. If a request has obvious potential to go unsatisfied, the programmer should expect that anomaly feedback will be expected. It’s the sort thing that should not even arise as a bug report.

    Now to be clear, I reported this thinking that SDF was blocking thelemmy.club… which would be fair enough if true, but it turns out not to be. kbin.cafe is the only expressely blocked instance. From there, it’s something else… maybe a silent block by the firewall or a block by the other host.