but it seems like you have to rely on an external 3rd party tool like https://browse.feddit.de/ to find any of them
That’s a tool that exists and can be very helpful, but you can also browse all communities federated with your instance by just going to “Communities” and selecting “all”. You can search for anything that way. It’s not perfect and in desperate need of some filtering/sorting tools (coming in the future I believe), but you definitely don’t have to use a third party tool! Also works on Jerboa, not sure about the iOS app.
If there is street parking there too, it sounds like someone was smash and grabbing from the cars.