Lemmy instances can’t see most communities out there, part of how the network works to keep load low for any one instance. Only when at least one user on that instance is subscribed to a community elsewhere do they see it. You want to search the whole Threadiverse, you want to open your web browser and hit lemmyverse.net, click on “Communities”, and search there, as they have a bot that walks all the instances out there and builds a list of communities.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

This is not, unfortunately, made incredibly obvious to new users.

If you see an community that you like on there, copy the name – which will be of the format “!communityname@instance.name” – and search for it on your instance. If your instance doesn’t know about that community, it’ll go talk to the instance with the community and fetch the community information. Your home instance is lemmy.world, which is the largest Lemmy instance, so you’ll probably have decent visibility, but this will ensure that you aren’t missing something.

There are also some instances that are defederated from other instances – that is, they don’t talk to each other, because the administrators on one instance have concerns about another instance. So, for example, you can’t reach !guns@hexbear.net from your home instance, even if you go search for it on lemmy.world, because lemmy.world’s admins have defederated from hexbear.net. You can see defederations at /instances – for lemmy.world, that’d be https://lemmy.world/instances

Unfortunately most users of Lemmy seem to fall into at least one of these two categories-

1. Don’t live in the US and therefore can’t own guns at all, or they’re so heavily regulated as to be functionally unavailable.

2. Extremely pro-big-government, so they may own or like guns, but have a huge list of caveats (“regulate me harder daddy”) every time they post.

Hence the gun community is pretty mid here.

Nah this is about it. In addition to what has already been said I’ll add one more reason, lemmy just isn’t very big yet, there’s only like 6 of us over on !comicbooks@lemmy.world lol. If it isn’t linux, piracy, communism, or star trek (because large communities of those people all settled here from elsewhere, mostly from reddit, and so they retained a critical mass of users necessary to develop further), there just isn’t many users. Other communities have to grow slow, unless you can convince a swath of r/guns users to all join together right now.

Welcome though! Glad to have you here.

Not that I’ve found. There’s a liberal gun owners community but it’s dead. The forgotten weapons space is the only somewhat popular area, but there’s one person posting.

!liberalgunowners@lemmy.world has a post a month.

Lemmy is very left wing, a large chunk are actual communists, including the devs.

They don’t like guns here, but you’re more than welcome to try to start up a community.