Some people have been asking which communities they should join first, so I posted some remote communities you can subscribe to on the sidebar on the homepage :)
There's also this universal community search tool you can try using. If you find a community, just copy its URL and paste it in /search to subscribe to it here. This just goes to show that while there might not be many local communities here on lemmy.one yet, the beauty of the fediverse means that doesn't matter!
You can’t see them if nobody here has subscribed to them yet, but if you paste the URL for those communities in https://lemmy.one/search, they’ll show up.
so that's how it works. i thought there might be a time delay, but this tracks with my experience yesterday going through the process.
the initial search does have to be specifically correct in order to find it though. I'm sure it's necessary, but something newcomers like me have difficulty learning the first time