A common problem of Lemmy compared to Reddit I see mentioned compared to reddit is the lack of way to search for it. Lots of people add “reddit” to their Google queries to get better results, however this is not possible with Lemmy due to its decentralized nature.

Could this problem be solved with a read-only instance which would import all past and future content from every federated instance, with the sole purpose of being indexed by search engines? This way, one would add “lemmyindex” or whatever its name is to their search queries.

I suppose server capacity would be a problem; however, due to it being read-only, caching would significantly reduce load, and images would still be hosted by their source instances.