Search is the one thing Lemmy needs to focus on right away, current search sucks and will run off lots of Reddit refugees their first day.

As of right now, a user in your instance has to search and/or sub to a community from another instance before it gets indexed. You could make some dummy account and sub to hundreds of remote communities so they're locally indexed without having to sub to them on your main account, but that's pretty time consuming and still not a great solution.

We really need a better way to search :(

In the same vein as dedicated forums, discoverability is harder, and that’s sadly just the nature of the beast.

One day someone may create a full indexer and scraper, but it’s still too early for that.

Searching different instances is sometimes turned off or even frowned upon. I think indexing is "opt-in" in many cases.

Searching Lemmy might be a different story. You may need to create some sort of filter to search multiple instances. You could probably set up a focus filter on Mojeek https://www.mojeek.com/focus/ and see how that does.

I’m used to this too.

I want to think it’s actually an anti-pattern; as we are seeing many Reddit people are deleting their accounts so searching Reddit might be less useful in the future.

Not sure what the alternative is though. Some of the communities I participate in went to Discord instead but that has search problems as well.

Search is definitely going to be the crux of the issue for the average user.

If they want to attract and retain the reddit users that aren't especially tech savvy (I totally admit that I am one of those people).