Doesn’t matter what account you have, you can see communities/subreddits across anyone of them.

I'm having trouble with this part. If I want to look up threads about the latest Pokemon movie, Reddit would let me just type "Pokemon Avengers of Middle Earth" into the search bar, and I would see hundreds of results from all different subreddits that I can comment on right away.

Lemmy only seems to search my local instance, unless I first

• search on lemmy.directory
• manually subscribe to those communities so they show up on my local instance
• search again on my local instance
• finally I can comment

It's a hassle. I would love if Lemmy included some kind of optional search mode that searches the directory instance, and then has a nice big button to subscribe to the results that are not federated (am I using that right?) with your current instance.

I understand there are growing pains, but I work in tech and I'm just barely stumbling along here. The "it's like email" analogy starts to fall apart pretty quickly once you realize Gmail can only send messages to Outlook if you first go to Outlook and copy a special code. For every email address you want to send to. The average user is going to give up.

Am I misunderstanding how it all works? I'm hoping to learn more. Just figuring out how to comment on this remote thread from my instance took forever. I don't even necessarily want to be subscribed here, but it seems to be required to make even a single comment. I am probably doing something wrong.