I'm on lemmy.world and found myself wanting to create several communities that I thought hadn't been created yet. It took me a while to figure out that communities don't propagate between instances until at least one person has searched for it by full name (with !).
I understand the technical reason for this, but now that lemmy.ml is maxed out and people are being encouraged to use other instances, it makes the lemmiverse feel much smaller than it actually is, because the search field on these smaller instances won't turn up anything that someone else hasn't already started searching.
The best case scenario is that there is a bunch of duplication as people create communities they think are missing. More likely, a lot of people who would otherwise participate will see the sparse community list on their instance and think that means there's nothing for them to see.
Is there something we can do to make communities more discoverable between instances?
Woah ... nice ... learnt of this just now from you!!! This may need to become common knowledge quickly or at least rolled into the platform itself.