I don't know anything about the mobile apps for the fediverse, but you can definitely search for communities from the Lemmy web UI (same goes if you're on kbin). If you go to the Communities tab there should be a search field in the upper-right.
Reddit admins using that "feature" to post under other usernames perhaps? I dunno if there's a way to check but I wouldn't be surprised if these folks were not actually subbed to the sub that they seem to care so much about.
I have been a daily reddit user since 2008. I had never seen a single Apollo ad or any discussion of Apollo.
Your search results are biased towards what you have browsed on Google.
Also you shouldn't be seeing ads with proper internet hygiene. Ublock origin, no script, vpn if you can. Res will strip out every reddit ad. And I'd highly recommend duck duck go or something more private than Google these days
I really wish Christen would reconsider or we could crowd-source"buying" Apollo. Nothing against Mlem (which is already very good considering how fast all this has been playing out)
Try Wefwef. I was hesitant about it because it’s a web app and because of the name, but it really runs well and is by far the closest to Apollo I’ve seen yet, both Mlem and Memmy are okay, but using Wefwef I keep forgetting I’m not using Apollo. And it is more full featured than either of the other two are yet.
Connect for Lemmy currently doesn't have a great community browser (hopefully that will change soon). What instance are you on? If you are on lemmy.world they have a pretty good community browser here: https://lemmy.world/communities. You can filter it to just search local communities (on lemmy.world) or all. Other instances probably have similar community search options.
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