

Oh, so i misunderstood part of your question, thanks for explaining !
Indeed, i can’t find a way to see the Instance Sidebar on Voyager. I’ll try to dig deeper, but i think there is no option for this. If this interests you, here is the codebase for Voyager, where it is possible to suggest enhancements (though there is no guarantee they will be implemented).
Finding communities on a specific instance also does not work easily aside from your local instance, at least on Voyager.
For the part of your original post where you point out that the search option does not give any results of the instance about a specific country, there may be another explanation : for your instance A to show results of another instance B, they need to be federated. This works when one user of instance A subscribes to something on instance B : then instance A adds instance B to its list, and start referencing its content (though i’m not sure if it references everything, or only the content of the communities that users of instance A subscribed to). So if you see nothing, maybe it’s because no one connected to instance B on your instance A, so they’re not aware of each other. (though it seems that mander.xyz is federated to a looooot of instances, so it’s probably not this problem)
But honestly, it’s also because the search engine seems quite bad. I tried searching for instances names i’m sure my instance is federated to, and it did show some of their communities but far from everything, and not even all the ones i’m subscribed to.
Some info to sum up :
- yes, searching for new communities, especially on other instances, and especially on apps, is quite hard, at least for now. Once you’re set up, it’s quite smooth, but the beginning may be strange.
- lemmy.ml is indeed quite a folkloric part of Lemmy, but i think you’ll find alternatives for most of the communities hosted there. They’re the “test” instance for Lemmy, managed by the dev, and also quite a big instance, so that’s why they haven’t been defederated from most instances yet, but they are an exception.
- If you want to see which instances your home instance is linked to, and which it blocked, you can find this on browser at the bottom of the main page, there is a “Instances” button.
C’est quoi le problème à Inrae ?