I agree it would be nice if the instances would pull in communities automatically instead of us needing to manually search for them. I guess that’ll be something the Lemmy devs do something about in the future. In the meantime, I have been using this site: https://lemmyverse.net/
I also did the Ansible setup.
Are you subscribing to communities? I think searching just pulls something like 20 posts but nothing else. Everything starts getting pulled in when someone subscribes.
I also had some issues with pictures but the problems just kind of resolved themselves. Maybe try resetting the server and see what happens.
Looks like you can follow communities by pasting their URLs in the search bar on Mastodon. The communities show up as if they’re users, but it looks like you can follow them and I guess reply as you normally would. Like you can follow this community by searching this URL: https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted