I only have a basic understanding of how any of this works, but I saw someone else having a similar problem earlier and it had to do with their server being defederated from the server hosting the community they were trying to subscribe to, I think?
You can subscribe to both the lemmy.world and lemmy.ml communities. Neither seem as established as the subreddit anyways (I would know, that subreddit is still number two in my Firefox recommendations even though I haven't been there in weeks...)
As mentioned in this thread, you can just use the regular search to find both communities. If one of use subscribes to a community on a different instance, you should be able to search for it. Otherwise, use a web browser to subscribe to it.