Sorry if this is a newbie question…

From what I understand - Lemmy Communities are ActivityPub Actors with their own address (kind of). Does this mean they can be followed remotely?

I’m on mastodon.social, and no search term I’ve tried comes back with an account to follow. (I’ve tried full address name, URLs, and just “lemmy.ml”, all of which get 0 results)

Am I missing something here? If its a Mastodon thing, what other fediverse apps work well with Lemmy?