The way Lemmy works right now is you search a community in your instance for it to then get shown, so you need to first discover that community from elsewhere. With that in mind, what are some growing communities that you discovered that could get some more love?
Good question! You can copy the text !cats@midwest.social, then click the magnifying glass at top right and search for the community.
It should then come up in your search results, where you can visit from your own instance, and click to subscribe.
Mastodon suffers from similar annoyances. I feel like this system could be improved, it’s pretty confusing for beginners. I support frontends rewriting links, I suppose (though I suppose there is the tricky issue of deciding what links point to the fedi. Maybe “!cats@midwest.social” should not be a link…)
It doesn’t even work on mobile for me. I save posts for later to join on my desktop. Lol