very new here, visiting different instances, and noticing that when I search “all” communities, I get different results based on what instance Im searching from. I joined one instance and subscribed to a community, but that instance was having technical problems, so I joined another instance, but I cannot find that same community to re-subscribe to. And searching from other instances gives new results not available in the first two.

Edit: okay so the answer is that someone from that instance has to subscribe to that community first before it will show up under “all” communities searches. Before that happens, go to an actual community aggregator like Lemmy Explorer to find the community, copy the url, go back to your instance, click the search icon at the very top, set your search to “all” and paste the url and search and it should pop up. do not open the “communities” page, even though the search bar there pulls up an identical looking page to the one pulled up by the search icon, they are two different pages and the url’s will not work on the community page.