i dont think you understood OP’s question and underlying points. the point of the question is about getting a working link out of a closed instance link ending up on search results, yes you could do what you just said but OP is talking about a faster and easier way to simplify that process for search engines to give back that working link, at least thats what i understood, plus selfhosting just a search engine of threadiverse/forumverse like Sepia Search would be less resource demanding than probably hosting a whole Lemmy instance just for that purpose, OP is suggesting a different approach or moreso wondering if its already a thing and just isnt aware of the existence of one