I ran into this same frustrating problem. The whole "fetches in the background after you search" thing makes sense in a very "you are technically correct" kind of way, but it would be a much better user experience to just have a spinner and wait for the community/post to be fetched, rather than gaslight users.
Why can't I find federated communities on lemmy.one?
One of the things that has been frustrating me most deeply when trying to move to Lemmy, especially as the exodus from Reddit really picks up steam, is finding new communities as they set up shop. Most of them appear to be landing on lemmy.ml, which has adopted more of an open-door policy for community creation. That's fine, I'm not asking lemmy.one to necessarily do the same. I picked this instance to take some pressure off the really big ones.
But the process is maddening.
- I search for (e.g.) the string "no man" in my lemmy.one Communities page under "All". No results.
- Someone mentions a cross-federation search at lemme.de. Why isn't this everywhere?
- I search there for "no man" and two communities pop, one at lemme.ml and one at lemmy.world. There are no subscribe links.
- The lemmy.ml one looks popular, so I copy the full URL and put it in my lemmy.one search. No results, and no "no results" message.
- OK, so I visit https://lemmy.ml/c/nomanss
How do I subscribe to that sopuli one, since it doesn't show up in my local search results?