Using Lemmy from a personal instance requires a little bit of work if you wanna start federating with the wider ecosystem and personalize your content. You just simply copy/paste the URL of the community you wanna view into your instances search bar and BOOM! We're federating.
But what I noticed is that you must use your keyboard to search by hitting Enter when using the top search bar on almost any lemmy page, the exception would the dedicated search page. Either way you still have to take two actions in order to search; one action too many in my opinion so lets shorten that.
To side step this I setup two hotkeys using the AutoControl browser add-on. If someone has a better way please let me know!
right click hold for 1s=paste+enterctrl+shift+v=paste+enter
This way no matter which page I'm on or if I'm only using my mouse I can execute one action to paste+search instantly! Makes searching for instances to federate with a breeze along with subscribing to their communities.