Just tried this and you're right, searching for a specific community seems borked.
Checking on GitHub, it looks like there's a commit just gone in to show the full community address on the search results page so that will at least solve part of the problem.
I don’t really understand the explanation but, I was told, “you can’t subscribe to an instance that your instance hasn’t already subscribed to”.
So, in your example, your instance is federated with @lemmy.ml, but not with @lemmy.world.
I hope someone can rephrase this, because how do you find new communities if you can’t find new communities?
This isn't really anything to do with OP's issue, but I'll try and take a stab at an explanation of your thing.
The first time an instance "knows" about a community hosted elsewhere is the first time a user searches for it through that instance. If they subscribe to it, the community will also now show up in that instance's "All" feed.
So your question naturally follows. If your instance doesn't know about communities elsewhere until the first person tells it, how can you find communities your instance doesn't know about yet?
That's where tools like Lemmyverse come in, this let's you search for communities hosted anywhere.
Hope that makes sense, writing this from my phone so excuse any typos etc.
The example above, I am trying to demonstrate how I am trying to navigate to !reddit@lemmy.world ( which is local instance, I am on lemmy.world)
But the search function lead me everywhere but lemmy.world. I can't even limit the search to local instance.
If only I have an address bar to enter specific text
Navigate community should be much better than use the search function.
Despite I searched "reddit" on lemmy.world
I change to community tab, Reddit is not shown first page
Scroll down a bit, I see multiple Reddit.
The first Reddit I click lead to kbin.social
I am looking for Reddit community, but the community named reddit don't ever show up in first page.
That's strange, on my side it shows the Reddit Lemmy world one as the first results.
A mobile client for Lemmy running on iOS and Android