Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)
You’re not the first, you just don’t get the full list of comments until you subscribe from your home instance… and I’m unsure if you get earlier comments than when you did that. It’s a bit of a pain point
You don’t need to just search, you need to have at least one member subscribed
So it’s more or less the same as mastodon… I had to move to another, bigger, instance to be able to see news and follow hashtags without a relay