Why can't I suscribe to communities in other instances?

From what I can tell, and don't quote me on this, this doesn't really matter.

Most of my subs I have on my own instance say subscribe pending but I still get the posts federated. Not sure what the reason is, would love if somebody could chime in.

Yeah I saw someone say it was an error and you actually are subed.
- This is true. I've had a similar error with communities I'm subbed to. Chalk it up to growing pains
Yeah, it's the same for me, in some communities the posts will show up normally even when in that state, exept for !anime_irl@kbin.social Only this one in specific won't federate for some reason

I mod two communities. There's nothing available that shows me "pending" subscriptions in order to approve/deny them. Just click the button again so it reverts back to a "Subscribe" button, then click it again. Keep doing this until it says "Joined" instead of "Pending." You may have to do it a dozen times, and may have to leave it for an hour/day and come back and try again.

I'm not 100% sure this is correct because I haven't looked at the protocol or implementations in detail yet, but I can offer some educated guesses.

"Pending" implies that you're waiting for some remote service, likely the other instance, to confirm that the subscription went through.

I can think of a few reasons why an instance may never send confirmation or why the message may not update:

that instance defederated your instance, meaning you can see them, but they refuse to see you. This makes sense for beehaw, given that they've defederated several instances, including lemmy.world
that instance hit an error
the request or response was lost somewhere along the network
your client, that is, the website or mobile app you're using, has a cached state of pending and never updated it even though it received confirmation

Maybe I'll dive into things tonight and get more info. Or i might forget. We'll see 😅

Just ignore it, you’re not missing any functionality. Just some kind of bug.

beehaw.org defederated lemmy.world, I'm sure that has something to do with your access these particular communities.

OP is from lemmy.ml.

Have you tried just refreshing the page once it says "pending"? Sometimes I get this and refreshing reveals that I am actually subscribed. When this happens the "pending" probably just indicates that the server's confirmation message didn't make it back.

For those that need an answer. You can fix the message by unsubscribing and subscribing from the individual community page. It won't work from the Communities listing page

ima newb. joined today. been scrolling for great many hours. cool platform. thanks everyone.

i also see lots of "PENDING". can only guess what that means.

On my own end, I can get Lemmy 0.18 instances such as .ml to un-pend by unsubscribing and re-subscribing, but Lemmy 0.17 instances such as .world or beehaw always show up as pending (despite sending posts over)

I think it's just the acknowledgements those instances are supposed to send to your instance being lost in transit. Everything seems to work fine otherwise

I can't even find a bunch of communities.. still can't pull this up on lemm.ee: !dundermifflin@lemmy.ml

Have you tried searching for https://lemmy.ml/c/dundermifflin?

Same here, I’d like to know too!