I'm surprised that no one made a bot that auto federate the instances, that would fix the search being wonky. But I guess we are in the early days.
This federation concept does not work as expected for me. If I understand correctly, I can access a community from mastodon, kbin and others. But In practice I get a lot of 404 errors.
For example, I want to access https://kbin.social/m/tech from lemmy. So I could access it by going to https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/c/tech@kbin.social, right? But I just get a "404: couldnt_find_community" error message.
Also the search functionality seems really broken when you want to search a community from another instance, sometimes it's in the results and sometimes it's not. Is there a cache of some kind or a really long delay when a community is new?