I’m currently using Connect (the android App) and search is even funkier, to the point where it order is frankly random, and it appears to only show “famous” instances or the ones I’m subscribed to at least a community.

I know this isn’t intended, but I can’t help but feel that if sync was possible, this wouldn’t be a noticible issue

Alright but what if there was an active community that moved to a self hosted one? Wouldn’t that still show the older community first?

Doesn’t it place higher the communities that are on the same instance as the user?

The issue with that is that an user could be on a popular instance, like lemmy.world or a related one like lemdroid, and search for a community on it. They could find a ghost community that was created unofficially before the self-hosted one. In that case they could think this is it and there’s no real discussion to be had on Lemmy.

It is also slightly weird because there’s an incentive for developers to grab the appname@popular.instance to ensure they can use the name and link it to the official instance. But that also leaves a ton of pretty much barren communities.

That’s why I think keeping in sync would be a good feature, keep all communities in sync with the official one so that users aren’t lost.

That said, this only works for official communities, and maybe(huge maybe) regional communities that have a self hosted instance

This is an issue I’ve been wondering about, the Technology example is fine, but the real edge case IMO is Official Communities.

Like, let’s say I have an Android App and want to migrate my official community to Lemmy. I could build a community in:

• A big and general instance to gather more users, like Lemmy.World.
• A big but themed instance, like Lemdro.id. It has a smaller number of users but they are more likely to be interested in my App
• I could make my own instance, which would allow me to dedicate communities into topics and I would have more control over it, which is good cause it is an official community.

I feel there should be a way for “sync” communities in those cases. It makes sense in those cases to allow a full sync, with the option to unsync if things go south and there’s a split.