You may notice that you can’t find every community in the Fediverse using the search: that’s normal

Lemmy doesn’t download information about other instances unless at least one user in the instance is subscribed to the community. If you search for an instance and don’t subscribe, we’ll see the posts you found and nothing more, the community updates won’t be automatically retrieved, but we’ll have a snapshot of the community at that time (unless a moderator purges it). This saves on storage costs and processing power in a big way.

If you want to subscribe to a community not listed, simply determine the URL of the community and enter it into the search box in the following format: !community@example.com (note the !)

Then visit the community and click “Subscribe” to add it to our server.

Not sure what communities there are out there? Check out one of these utilities to discover more:

If you find additional sites, message me and I can add them to this list.