I almost never got search results when searching for communities. I was interested if searching for .nz worked like this post suggested, but no luck.
I’ve tried a bunch of different searches and realised a few things (screenshots here):
If I search for .nz, no.lastname.nz, trees@no.lastname.nz or !trees in “Communities” I get no results. If I search for !trees@no.lastname.nz, I still get no results, but the “No results” text never shows up.
But… if I search for just trees in “Communities” it shows up. And the above searches work if I set the type to “All” or “Posts”. That’s OK if I’ve got the full name and instance, but if it’s just a search term like .nz, smaller communities get lost among the posts and comments.
Is there something I’m doing wrong? It’s behaving the same on my computer and phone, both Firefox. I’ve tried logging out and logging in (by the way, it just kept ignoring my logout request so I had to delete the cookie lemmy.nz had set).
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@instanceafter finding the address elsewhere. I can’t always force the server to federate it, but it usually gets there with enough patience and refreshes.