So the first thing to understand is that when you search for communities, what you are actually searching is the communities that are known to YOUR server (instance). The server you are on may be smaller and not have a lot of users who have already connected to the communities you are interested in.

Lets say through some other method you learn of another community that you want to join, but you can’t find it on your server. No problem, you can easily TELL your server this community exists. Go to the community search screen, and enter the full URL for that other community. For example, this one here would be found at https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support. Do a search and it won’t find anything, but now you can immediately do a second search for the short name (lemmy_support) and NOW your instance will find that community and allow you to click on it and join it. And now that you have told your server about this community, anyone else on your instance that searches for it will immediately find it without needing the full URL.

Now how do you find all these new communities in the first place? Well some folks have been building great new tools that will help you. For instance, today I have been using the global search at https://lemmyverse.net/communities Give it a try, when you find something you like click on the server address (the small text underneath the friendly community name) and it will copy the URL to your clipboard. Paste that in your own community search, then search for the shorter name, and now your instance knows of that one too.

Yes it’s a bit of a pain if you’re the first one to look for that community, but your work makes it easier for everyone else, and the additions made by other people will in turn benefit your searches.

How long ago did you start the instance. It took my instance 3 days to stabilize before things started working properly.