Lemmy Support

The popular instances can take a long time to respond. There’s no feedback in the UI either, you click search and then eventually the result will appear. Depending on what you search for, your instance collects more data than what you’re actually searching for.

It takes time for your instance to read and gather data about a community. It only does so when you search its address for the first time. I don't know if it keeps tabs on the community of no user subscribed to it on your instance though.

In particular I am seeing this error when searching for example for: https://lemmy.world/c/science@beehaw.org

 2023-06-24T10:03:44.536671Z ERROR HTTP request{http.method=GET http.scheme="http" http.host=lemmy.krobier.com http.target=/api/v3/ws otel.kind="server" request_id=36cc840b-4954-4504-ae86-bcb822fbacbe http.status_code=101 otel.status_code="OK"}: lemmy_server::api_routes_websocket: couldnt_find_object: error decoding response body: expected value at line 1 column 1
    0: lemmy_apub::fetcher::search::search_query_to_object_id
              at crates/apub/src/fetcher/search.rs:17
    1: lemmy_apub::api::resolve_object::perform
            with self=ResolveObject { q: "https://lemmy.world/c/science@beehaw.org", auth: Some(Sensitive) }
              at crates/apub/src/api/resolve_object.rs:21
    2: lemmy_server::root_span_builder::HTTP request
            with http.method=GET http.scheme="http" http.host=lemmy.krobier.com http.target=/api/v3/ws otel.kind="server" request_id=36cc840b-4954-4504-ae86-bcb822fbacbe http.status_code=101 otel.status_code="OK"
              at src/root_span_builder.rs:16

Some other very popular communities in very popular servers I don’t find at all (even if those servers are in my “federate” list. What am I missing?

Lemmy is not scaling well, even with 0.18, and a lot of federation activity is timing out or otherwise failing. There are a few open GItHub issues: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3203

Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, Beehaw.org - are often ones that give the most trouble. Try small ones and confirm it isn't every server.