[SOLVED] Why is my Lemmy instance not finding other instances' communities?

Edit: YOOOOOOOO YOU CAN EDIT TITLES HERE

Anyway, you have to first search for the community in the format !whatever@where.ever. It doesn't show up the first time but if you mash Enter for a while it will...

Also, this FAQ linked by @Wistful@discuss.technics.de is pretty helpful and covers some of the pitfalls of being the first (or only!) person in an instance to subscribe to a community: https://lemm.ee/post/37715

Edit 2: Found https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3055 requesting better support for discovering federated communities. Please consider upvoting that issue if you have a github account and think it would be helpful!

---

I made myself a lemmy: https://tortoisewrath.com

You may notice I am not writing to you from said lemmy... because https://tortoisewrath.com/c/selfhosted@lemmy.world is a 404. In fact, though it appears to have federated itself with a bunch of other servers, it only appears to be able to see two communities. These were among the first few communities I tried to access (technology@beehaw.org didn't work but those two did) - since adding those two, I haven't been able to see any others, even on lemmy.ml where the first two were.

Is this normal? Do I just need to be more patient and it'll figure it out on its own, or is there some switch I need to flip to make it do the thing?

(Apologies if this is obvious to those who understand the fediverse but I have no idea what I'm doing)