For me its having a single instance that indexes all the communites to which all other instances can then pull that information from so when I go searching for communities the I’ll have access to every single one with needing to post the entire URL in the search bar
That’s because you joined the largest community. It’s much more cumbersome for smaller communities.
Indeed. The largest weak point for me.
I have to go to third party site where I can see a list of communities, find one, copy some url, go back to my instance and search then paste the url.
At this point I get nothing, or 404, or a nothing found error. Generally this is where it stalls, and i give up and come back half an hour later if I remember and try again.
This time the search may find the community, but has failed to do so several times. Still trying to subscribe to a pathfinder community which I started trying to do earlier this morning
Usually, I search for the URL, but it gives no results. However, in the backend my lemmy instance is downloading a bunch of posts from that instance, and when I look at my list of communities, it’s suddenly there. Awful user experience, but it works. I’m sure this will improve in the future.