So it’s true, then, that lemmy doesn’t have a community search tool? I still feel like I have to be misunderstanding somehow. It has to have a search function. How else is it supposed to federate to anything? I know people successfully search for kbin mags over there. How else would it even find its own communities? It can’t just be a big ass list, it would be too long to be usable.

Just FYI, while I do not disagree with you, the sort-by-hot ordering is bugged in the current lemmy version, which causes threads not to “cool off”. It will be fixed with the next update (fix is already done, just not shipped yet).