I cant search for some communities that show up in newcommunities, and I hear that thats because no one on my instance has been to them yet. Well, how do I be the first one? I cant join by searching because it wont show up, and if I click on a link there it takes me out of the app to that communities instance, and logs me out, and I cant log in because I only have the option to log in to their instance which I dont have an account on.
Go to websites of other popular instances and without even logging in check out their community lists. Once you find a community you want, copy the url, then go back to your instance and paste the whole url into the search box. That should let your instance link to that community and it will start showing up in All for other users as well.
i tried that and the search bar in my instance didn’t show anything…
Try searching the full community url in the web interface? Maybe Jerboa search has not enabled the linking feature yet, but you only need to link once. My web instance search page has a “type” dropdown option, and linking unknown communities only worked for me when searching for “type=URL” or “type=All”. Also check that your instance has not blocked your target server: https://lemm.ee/instances