This one is the best community finder that I’ve seen. Advice about shoes may be too small of an interest at this point. Lemmy (jerboa) is just starting to attract users to talk to.

I find it easier to search using the browser, subbing to community you want/need and then refreshing jerboa.

Try here

If there isn't a niche spot for your shoe question, maybe just asking the question in the "chat" could find some folks to help?

I'm sure the search function will improve as communities grow and the instances load each other's content, but for now, http://browse.feddit.de has been my preference.

Click the second icon from the left, with 3 lines. At the top of that page you can type in a search term. However, a couple caveats... 1, it won't find anything if you do the full community@domain, so just search on the community name portion. 2, it only returns 5 results, so if the one you're looking for isn't in that list your kinda screwed. 3, I noticed a bug where if you preview a community and then press back, it goes back to its default state, so you have to delete a letter and re-type it to get the results list again.

Adding from your instance's website might be easier in some cases, but I've found the feature in the app easier often times.