As someone trying small instance I have to explore other instances using good old browser and then try to open it in Boost. For some reason sometimes it just doesn’t work, even for communities that are in lemmy.world! Ones I have tried and failed are:
https://lemmy.film/c/moviesandtv
https://lemmy.world/c/linux_gaming
https://programming.dev/c/programmer_humor
And some others I may have forgotten. For comparison, if you click https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy it should correctly open in Boost instead of browser.
Lemmy instances need to be made aware of communities on other instances (that is, bookwormstory.social doesn’t automatically know about every community in the “threadiverse”).
An instance can be told about a specific community by searching its URL in the search bar (on the website at least). This needs to be done once per instance in order to browse it from that instance.
If it isn’t already, this would be a nice feature for Boost to do automagically.
It’s tricky and something that largely sorts itself out over time as an instance matures. It was a lot of leg work early on manually searching up communities with lemdro.id but has been smooth sailing the last few months!
Yeah looks like I still have to use the browser more than I thought I would be. At least I hope the search button up there on Boost works for that “once per instance” thing someday.