In Create Post screen, community search is weak for common community IDs

[Pxtl]

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Is your proposal related to a problem?

I'm not sure if this is front-end or back-end:

I moderate and post to "lemmy.ca/c/worldnews". It has the name "World News for Canadians". When I try to create a post on lemmy.ca and I go to select the Community, and I search for "Worldnews", it lists every community on every instance with Worldnews in the title, with "World News for Canadians" appearing somewhere in the middle, difficult to find. It works if I search by "World News for Canadians", but realistically that's not the URL I type in to link to it so that's less notable.

As you can see from this screenshot, finding my community is a bit of a Where's Waldo.

Thanks.

Describe the solution you'd like.

I don't know what the correct fix is, I can think of many possibilities (I think ID is the jargon for the URL-name, right?):

1. Allow us to search by full instance-resolved IDs like "lemmy.ca/c/worldnews" and "!worldnews@lemmy.ca"
2. Elevate communities we are subscribed to to the top of the dropdown (it appears to be ranked by popularity by default, I think).
3. (weak) Include the fully-resolved IDs in the dropdown next to the name where the name does not match the ID. At least there the less-helpful Names/Titles are augmented by the IDs.

3 is tangential, but it can be confusing when the Community name substantially does not match the ID, for example News@feddit.org is actually feddit.org/c/WorldNews
eg "World News for Canadians (lemmy.ca/WorldNews)"
eg "News (feddit.org/WorldNews)"

Also it's odd that the "instance/community" format doesn't match either fedi standard or the URL. I'd assume it would be either "!community@instance.tld" or "instance.tld/c/community" not "instance/communit", but that's out-of-scope.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

I can search by full title-name "World News for Canadians" but that's clumsier since that's mostly just the title at the top of the screen when looking at the community. It's not the URL or the !community@instance link.

Additional context

No response

[dessalines]

Use the create post button in the sidebar of the community itself.

The Search api only does fuzzy searching on the name and title, not the full activitypub id, or anything else. Unsure that really needs to be added, since a big create post button is already in the sidebar of every community.

[Pxtl]

@dessalines That's a fair point - I think the Create Post search also elevates the current Community if you're looking at the community in question anyways, so the workflow isn't so bad when you're looking at the community's page already. Like I said, there are workarounds, this would just be a nice UX enhancement when you're wanting to post to one of your communities directly from the main instance homepage.

[Nutomic]

This uses the normal search endpoint (eg /api/v4/search?q=news&type_=communities&sort=top&listing_type=all). We can easily change the sort to show subscribed communities first. We can also check against community.ap_id. Supporting !worldnews@lemmy.ca would be more complicated as it is not stored in the db.

By the way, in the dev version on voyager.lemmy.ml it already shows communities in the dropdown using !worldnews@lemmy.ca format.

Relevant code:

• compare community::ap_id here
• sort by subscribed first

[dessalines]

Search sort is only new, top, and old, as its a combined endpoint. It wouldn't be possible to sort by subscribed there.

We can also check against community.ap_id.

This would be doable, and pretty easy.

Supporting !worldnews@lemmy.ca would be more complicated as it is not stored in the db.

We could also possibly transform search queries in that format to standard apub style ones.