Why is my Lemmy instance not finding other instances' communities?

https://lemmy.world/post/146792

Why is my Lemmy instance not finding other instances' communities? - Lemmy.world

I made myself a lemmy: https://tortoisewrath.com [https://tortoisewrath.com] You may notice I am not writing to you from said lemmy… because https://tortoisewrath.com/c/[email protected] [https://tortoisewrath.com/c/[email protected]] is a 404. In fact, though it appears to have federated itself with a bunch of other servers [https://tortoisewrath.com/instances], it only appears to be able to see two communities [https://tortoisewrath.com/communities/listing_type/All/page/1]. These were among the first few communities I tried to access ([email protected] [[email protected]] didn’t work but those two did) - since adding those two, I haven’t been able to see any others, even on lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] where the first two were. Is this normal? Do I just need to be more patient and it’ll figure it out on its own, or is there some switch I need to flip to make it do the thing? (Apologies if this is obvious to those who understand the fediverse but I have no idea what I’m doing)

Is there a description like this for kbin.social? Not sure if it's just because of some cloudfare issues but for example communities on the Lemmy instance feddit.de do not show up for me on kbin.social. Some of their posts do, though.

But if I search for e.g. [email protected] on kbin.social it won't show up and therefore I can't subscribe to it from kbin's side.

I believe you just need to remove the exclamation point and search for [email protected] on kbin. Not totally sure why but I expect this is just one of the kinks that'll be ironed out once things are less on fire around here
Just tested this, yes remove the exclam and it works.