It was well before I turned one; I was still in a crib. It was dark, nighttime, and incredibly hot. Some sort of animal with glowing eyes stared at me from the floor.

I thought it was a dream, but decades later my parents confirmed that when I was a baby the thermostat had broken and we had a night where the temperature was 100°. As for the animal with glowing eyes, that was our cat.

I think Lemmy desperately needs to integrate two things:

• The ability to search for communities across instances inside of Lemmy (I’m aware of the search option outside of Lemmy, but that’s less than ideal)
• The ability to easily search within posts A) in all local communities, B) in all subscribed communities, and C) across all communities in the whole Fediverse. Yes, I’m aware that C) is a huge ask. But I think it’s vital to the success of Lemmy.

It’s not bad, but there are a couple of issues that concern me. One is that communities are fractured - that is, that communities about the same topics exist on different instances and don’t connect with each other.

So I’m subscribed to a Books community on one instance, but that doesn’t mean I’ll see any of the posts on the same topic on other instances unless I subscribe to each of them. The total community of users on Lemmy who are interested in books are split up into small groups on different instances.

That’s very limiting.

Of course there’s also the issue of the relatively small user base overall. For some purposes a small community may be preferable, but for many others you really need a large user base. Looking for gamers for a face to face tabletop RPG, for example. Without a large user base, the odds of finding people within a reasonable real world distance of you is virtually nil.