I need some help to figure out how I can search for new communities that are not yet cached on my instance.
If just search by !somecommunity@someinstance or the url, it just comes up empty everytime.
The only app I managed to get this working smoothly from the ones I tried is Voyager.
I understood your case, so I don’t know if this will helps anyhow, but I just wanted to suggest https://lemmyverse.net/communities as well.
Really great site to search for communities and instances, with available filtering.