When I use startrek.website as my instance I get different search results than if I log into a different instance.

From what I can gather this is because startrek.website has yet to be federated with lots of other instances.

I think I should be able to connect to other instances and communities through the search but nothing happens if I put the address in the search in the way it says in the documentation.

Since today I do get some search results from lemmy.world, beehaw.org and lemmy.ml I think.

Is it just a matter of waiting for it all to propagate and connect or am I doing something wrong? I'm using jerboa on android.

We're still learning the ins and outs of Federation, but I think it's mostly just a matter of waiting. Here's what the official documentation has to say about it:

If you search for a community first time, 20 posts are fetched initially. Only if a least one user on your instance subscribes to the remote community, will the community send updates to your instance.

So Federation should continue to improve over time.

Thanks, I really like the whole idea of Lemmy and this instance. it's quite exciting being present for the start of it all. It took a while for it to compute in my brain but I'm getting there.

We are boldly going!