I have actually made a few PRs when I first came to lemmy.

Awesome!

solving the wrong problems

I would say this is far too generalized. Since you seem very smart you might want to reflect on this. The issues that lemmy solves are still prevalent outside of it and you are speaking from a place of privilege imo since you (as am I) are educated enough to make it here, build stuff and change things. We are the minority and we should not go running away before the world can catch up.

The proper solution to search, imo, is a separate service that indexes as much of the fediverse as possible.

I disagree, respectfully though since you make good points. I think it is already enough to index the servers you have federated with. For example, my own instance federates with world. I want to be able to see all communities, not posts or comments, that are on world, together with a rought member and post count. That way I can make an informed decision. I think you are making this too much a low level decision. The reason we are all here and the ultimate goal of lemmy and the fediverse imo is agency, nothing else. And that is what we should be striving for.

I have to run but I might come back to this later to answer the rest. I think we’re pretty constructive together. Maybe we should connect on github or something. I’m working on another fediverse thing.

See ya later. Feel free to send me a dm if you like.