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There are many lemmy instances in the world, but currently most people are using lemmy.world. This is why everything has gotten so slow.
You don't have to delete your lemmy.world account, but check out https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map it's a geo-based map of lemmy instances -- explore stuff nearest you, pick one, sign up, search , subscribe and begin interacting with your favorite communities. It's easy, free and it will be faster. Try it!
I tried to migrate to another instance by rejoining the same communities as this account. However I can't seem to find some of the communities anymore through the other instance's search page. There's no indication that there's any defederation going on.
I still have no idea what a proper community joining process is. I just go to the search page, type it in and scroll through the random comments until I find a link to a community.
If only I could just copy the community link, right now it'll just open up with lemmy.world again, so I have to go through the other instance's search page. Please let me know if there's a guide of any kind.
As far as I understand, your instance is only aware of a community on another instance if at least one user on your instance has subscribed to that community on the other instance. Perhaps that's what you're experiencing?
If you search for a community first time, 20 posts are fetched initially. Only if a least one user on your instance subscribes to the remote community, will the community send updates to your instance. Updates include:
New posts, comments
Votes
Post, comment edits and deletions
Mod actions
These previous ways will only show communities that are already known to the instance. Especially if you joined a small or inactive Lemmy instance, there will be few communities to discover.
I just put the url in the search box on the Lemmy webui sand search. I find a lot of the time it says nothing found but if I click search a second tinder it finds it so it must be a bug. Then click the community and subscribe.