So the way Lemmy works is that a instance will only know about (and have the content of) a community if a user on that instance is subscribed to it. So when you browse All or search, only those communities that someone on the instance is subscribed to are included in the results. On a smaller instance that’s naturally going to be fewer communities.
Now if you search for a specific community by its URL that the instance doesn’t yet know about, it will actually go and fetch it for the first time. What this looks like to the user though is that the search shows no results, then suddenly 5-10 seconds later the results change and the community appears. Which is not a great UX for someone new. So again on an instance with more people it’s a lot more likely that someone else has already searched for and subscribed to what you’re looking for so that you don’t see that issue
I love Lemmy but I find the extreme pro-FOSS bias and hatred of everything else to be pretty abrasive and not conducive to useful or interesting discussion. And that’s coming from someone who both loves to use and contribute to FOSS. But my preferred desktop OS isn’t Linux which apparently according to the Lemmy hivemind is a big no-no.
I think more Lemmy users need to learn that the upvote and downvote buttons aren’t meant to be used to indicate agreement and disagreement respectively, it’s to indicate if a comment is valuable contribution to the discussion regardless of whether or not you agree.
In a post discussing Chrome, a few comments about alternative browsers make sense. But if there are 100s and 100s of comments all just saying some variation of “switch to Firefox otherwise you suck” and those are the only ones that are upvoted, then the whole comment section becomes pointless.