I am trying to find an additional home base lemmy that I jive with that is a bit smaller and less likely to get crushed. While exploring I have found disparities in which foreign communities I can search for and find despite all being in the federated instance list. Most of the time I can’t find the community I know exists, or I do find and the User count is so wildly off that I question if I have found the correct one(I have).
It seems to me that the communities@foreignInstance are irregularly/periodically updated into a local cache. If I am correct can Lemmy servers at least expose ‘Last Update time’, ‘Next Update time’ and just general mean time between updates?
Probably what’s happening is your instance is still doing the initial import of the community.
When someone searches for a community for the first time the instance also fetches 20 posts (I’m guessing the most recent ones).
Because of this the search result for the first time will not contain the community, after a few minutes it will appear.
One thing is for sure, you need to use the correct format to denote a community and also do it in the search page.