Support / questions about Lemmy.
You can always try constructing the URL manually. I know this sucks, but it might be a workaround.
https://lemmy.ml/c/songaweek@lemmy.world
Long story short you just have to go to lemmy.ml and then add /c/ followed by the community name @ the instance it belongs to.
Sometimes on my instance I have to search for it twice and it shows up about 5 seconds after I search the second time.
Yeah, with a community not subscribed to from my home instance, I first get an error message, then I refresh and up pops the community.
The problem is most likely that nobody on lemmy.ml has ever searched for the songaweek community before. That means that the !songaweek@lemmy.world "shorthand" URL will not work. This is a big problem for smaller or younger instances. The problem is so pervasive on Lemmy right now that Lemmy.ninja voted to recommend people use the full URL when linking to communities in our communitysearchtips community.
no man, that "shorthand" is exactly how you're supposed to search for new communities. Its exactly how I've added every community to my personal instance