Several communities I have tried to join from this account appear to sit at SUBSCRIBE PENDING forever, but when subscribing to the same group from my Friendica account seem to sit in WAITING FOR APPROVAL for ~1 minute.
In both cases I appear to be able to interact with the community without any difficulty.
Of note search is instance based and only includes other instances that members have subscribed to at least one community…
I have been actively looking at 3rd party sites that list out interesting instances and communities because search is very limited here still. It really seems like lemmy’s search design will promote lots of duplication and islands of similar but separate content.
I just learned of this https://lemmyverse.net/ probably will help your issue. set your home instance to lemmy.ca and it will automatically fix all the links to be to this instance instead of the instance the community resides on.
That looks much better than https://browse.feddit.de/ . Still the built in search of the platform should be better… I hope it improves as who is going to stumble on to that site otherwise?