"has anyone from my server interacted or searched for the post by it's URL" is misleading. I struggled with this yesterday. Turns out you have to search in a very specific way.

In both kbin and Lemmy, you can't just go to the community's URL (which is utterly bizarre). You must search the full magazine name. In Lemmy, you weirdly need the ! in front when searching it to find it. In kbin, you don't need that, but you do need to search the magazine in the "neutral" search mode, not magazine search mode (lol wut?). Actually, in Lemmy you also have to use the "normal" search field and not the community search field.

And of course, both have a discovery issue. People want to be able to search a partial string like "hobby" without having to know what instance their community might be on or if the full name might be things like "hobby_discuss", etc. They should not need a separate tool to do this search. That's just a barrier to entry.

Anyway the whole thing is a usability barrier that needs to change. It also makes smaller instances actively harder to use, which is a bad incentive. We don't want people to experience small instances as "buggy" (even if it's working as intended).

Anyone currently trying to create a sub should have an account on every major instance and subscribe to their new sub to ensure it shows up in the search. And yes, that is just completely silly (and unscalable beyond the biggest instances).