It’s kind of a futile exercise because even if you could search communities on a defederated instance
It’s not about the server making extra connections. The search failed to get results given a specific community name and location. The software knows why it failed. It is neglecting to pass that info on to the user. Giving specific error feedback is the sort of task that should be an automatic assumption when writing code. If a request has obvious potential to go unsatisfied, the programmer should expect that anomaly feedback will be expected. It’s the sort thing that should not even arise as a bug report.
Now to be clear, I reported this thinking that SDF was blocking thelemmy.club.. which would be fair enough if true, but it turns out not to be. kbin.cafe is the only expressely blocked instance. From there, it’s something else.. maybe a silent block by the firewall or a block by the other host.