Lemmy’s current approach to finding off-instance communities is a UX nightmare.

To the average, non-techy user pasting !<community>@<instance_url> to get No results despite knowing that community exists is… Offputting. Lemmy should not be showing No results while waiting to federate content, and it should be health-checking a search term before returning anything. A single request to <instance_url>/c/<community> would reveal it exists, and prevent this terrible No results response entirely.

Lemmy.ml performance is… slow due to overloading, and other lemmy servers sign-ins are busted - endless loading circles, endless createPostLike console log spam.

Subscribed, great idea. Keep the transparency on the costs and I think you’ll find assistance with them fairly easily.