This is a Lemmy software defect (posted here).

There is also a workaround. If the mod renames the community from “IRC” to something like “Internet Relay Chat 💬🖧”, it will become more searchable. Then someone can search just for “relay” or the speech bubble (“💬”) and it will match without all the circle jerking.

    • evenwichtOPEnglish
      2·
      22 days ago

      That only works from the search bar at the top, and only if the user already knows there is an IRC forum at lemmy.cafe. It fails on other forms. Suppose you post something in !irc@lemmy.sdf.org and then you want to crosspost to irc@lemmy.cafe. If you search from the cross-post form, the fully qualified name finds nothing (which is yet another Lemmy bug). We are forced to query on a single-word token and it cannot have an “@”. Results for “IRC” are longer than the page can support.

      Suppose you do the reverse: you 1st post to !irc@lemmy.cafe and then cross-post to !irc@lemmy.sdf.org. Since the SDF community has “internet relay chat” as the long name, you can just use “relay” as the search query to reach it.