That’s the box I used too. I looked into it a bit further and I think possibly the issue is the community/magazine you were searching for had not been subscribed to before by a user on your home instance. In that case the instance has no index for that community/magazine and you need to manually point it toward the instance it’s on. But once this is done the community info is cached in the search for any user on that instance looking for that community later on. I guess once the ecosystem is mature then provided you’re on a relatively populated instance and the community you’re searching for isn’t too niche, you could just go to the community search first and it’d work most of the time.
Also in Aus here, using ISP DNS, not blocked. I think what you generally find is that most ISP’s just don’t do the DNS blocks, even if they’re required to. Like you said, it’s very easily circumvented and also it just doesn’t lead to any measurable outcome other than the ISP customer’s dissatisfaction in some cases. It’s probably more profitable to retain the customers and deal with whatever regulatory blowback.