Yeah the community search on Lemmy leaves a lot to be desired. There's no sort function and I'd like to be able to list them in order of activity. At this point I don't know what to do other than scroll through pages and pages of listings. I'll give those searches a try, very helpful.
Filtering would be nice, particularly by instance. I've had a few instances where I've opened the instance directly, saw a few I want to subscribe to, but then had to search for them one by one in my own instance.
However you can set your home instance in Lemmyverse and get links for each instance via your own, where you can subscribe.