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
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.