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)

I'd also like to know how it works. I switched to sh.itjust.works because it's a lot faster than lemmy.world, but trying to migrate my subscriptions, lemmy.ca doesn't show up, nor does lemmygrad.ml.
yeah there was some inbound federation struggles with lemmy.ca the past few days, those might still be persisting. its where I'm homed, it works great from the inside! :)