Ask your questions here
It's interesting. As you can see from the snip in my post that you linked to it worked well on my instance. I then tested on lemmy.world with results like you found.
To find communities try one of the search tools like https://lemmyverse.net/communities
I was using https://browse.feddit.de/ to find communities. Your one is heaps better. I'm going to go exploring.
It looks like you were searching in "Posts" in your screenshot. Have you tried searching in "Communities"?
I think the solution for me at the moment is to set the search type to "All" and search for the full !community@instance after finding the address elsewhere. I can't always force the server to federate it, but it usually gets there with enough patience and refreshes.
I think there's some quirks here, from what I've heard other people talk about, e.g. if you are searching for a community that isn't yet federated, it won't work if you have selected to search "Communities". You have to leave it on the All setting.
So basically, no you aren't doing something wrong, Lemmy is pretty buggy and the huge increase in users has led to many new bugs being found, but first they need to focus on performance because the big instances are really struggling (there is a performance update expected next week).
We will try to keep up to date as best we can, but in the meantime we kinda just have to live with it.
With regards to logging out, I haven't had this issue but I've heard it from others. While the next update is focused on performance, they are changing how the website talks to the server so it's possible some of these issues may get resolved then.
I had the same issue. Tried to search for this community https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy , it only appeared briefly when I switched to All and then a split second later all posts appeared. But nothing when searching for just Communities. I'm on the mobile pwa.
It's there for me. But the communities are listed with their display names. So if I search just Communities for "piracy", I see it there. But it's not listed as " piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, but as "Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com"
OK, thanks.
FYI: This is happening for communities that are definitely federated, including ones I've subscribed to and even communities on lemmy.nz itself.
It might be worth searching github for the issue, to see if it's been reported. There might even be more info in the issues as well.
Note that Lemmy has more than one Github repository, notably the Lemmy and Lemmy-UI ones that cover the server and website.
OK, someone's reported it there, (interestingly, using !support@lemmy.nz as an example). It seems like a UI bug. Hopefully it gets fixed soon.