Lemmy's current approach to finding off-instance communities is a UX nightmare.

To the average, non-techy user pasting !<community>@<instance_url> to get No results despite knowing that community exists is... Offputting. Lemmy should not be showing No results while waiting to federate content, and it should be health-checking a search term before returning anything. A single request to <instance_url>/c/<community> would reveal it exists, and prevent this terrible No results response entirely.

Lemmy.ml performance is... slow due to overloading, and other lemmy servers sign-ins are busted - endless loading circles, endless createPostLike console log spam.

Signing in hangs for me. Registered (since lemmy.ml server performance is degrading with all the new users) but sign in just fails silently. Think it's capcha-related.

Subscribed, great idea. Keep the transparency on the costs and I think you'll find assistance with them fairly easily.