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.”

I’m having similar issues with federation to Serge here. I created my own private Lemmy instance and am confused on what exactly I should expect. On my private instance, I searched for a community here on lemmy.ml and it pulled 20 posts from the community. Awesome! Unfortunately, it pulled the oldest posts. New posts do not show up as I would expect them to, and I cannot even browse the comments.

Subscribing to the community has not changed anything. It does not update automatically.

Am I correct in thinking that without lemmy.ml federating with my instance, I should expect to see all posts and comments but not interact with them in any way? (and in order to interact, I’d need to ask lemmy.ml to federate with my instance)