I’ve just subscribed to https://sopuli.xyz/c/y2k, and now refreshing its local representation here at https://lemmy.ml/community/18886, but still no content. Will continue refreshing and will update this post as soon as I see the content reached this instance, but anyway I’m curious how long it could usually take.
Update 1: more than 40 minutes has passed, I see a new post with a video appeared on the remote side, and almost instantly here on lemmy.ml. But the previous post still not here.
Correct, and your instance won’t receive updates. I’m also not sure why a private instance would want to federate w/ anyone tho.
As far as pulling the oldest posts tho, I’ll look into that.
Ah, I meant private as in “basically only really for me,” not “sequestered from everything else.”
I created my own instance as a challenge to myself, to have control over my user account and (at least local) data, and because I wanted to mess with federation. It’s unfortunate that I can’t even see a read-only view of a remote community that I’ve “subscribed” to without first copying each post into my local instance’s search bar.
If this is intended, I would recommend greying-out the “subscribe” button if the remote instance doesn’t federate with the local instance.
EDIT: Perhaps not graying it out, but putting up a warning that says something to the effect of “Due to the fact that X instance doesn’t federate with this instance, you will not see new posts, updates, or comments to this community until that happens.”
The problem is, if your instance is not on the allowlist, then all activities from your instance will be discarded, including follow requests. We have an open issue to show an error in that case: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1327