Currently the islands just like spawn in right in front of your face and the only way to really find them is to use a map (to keep track of you) and look out for birds in the sky (means island).
They said there fixing the server browser bug asap in a thread on the forums (cant remember which one).
Yea I agree, when I first started I could only find one piece of flint so I had to spawn the rest in. The crafting needs to be made way easier or the wiki needs to be...