Expected

As users are never sure how a community name is written/addressed correctly, Piefed should be most tolerant and helpful.

A user should be able to quickly recover from typos/errors through Piefed's assistance.

Pre-filters for results should be absolutely transparent.

Actual

• There are many ways and completely different UI/UX for community lookups:
  1. https://piefed.social/communities
  2. https://piefed.social/search (community filter tab)
  3. That "Communities" dropdown on every page's head ^1^
  4. Post composition (usually pre-assigned because Create Post buttons are on community pages) ^1^
  5. When linking to communities in text compositors.^2^
  6. When moving a post^3^
  7. When cross posting, the user got prompted for a leading "!" until recently.^3^
• There's no assistance in the Feed editing view. ^4^
• When typing the wrong address e.g. piefed.social/c/piefed_meta_with_typo the user is forwarded to the community creation form, not to a lookup page.

I did not check which of those support lookup by name (url) and/or title. Of course, both should be supported.

^1^) Restricted to joined and moderated communities (full list!)

^2^) User has to type "!"

^3^) UI freezes after typing "!"

^4^) "!" is not allowed but should be tolerated.

The search can definitely be improved, it's often a point of frustration for me.

It would also be nice to keep these options available once you've searched.

I sometimes search for eg. the ' Fish ' community, only to realize I forgot to select communities, and then I have to click back and type in Fish again and select community.

Would be nice to just click Community and then boom it now searched for that.

Could also track which one of the three users use the most, and then set that as the default.

Not saying let's track every user, but maybe just a counter that ticks up each time someone searches for either.