The way posts are shared between instances is by user subscription. For example, if there's a community on Lemmy and a Kbin user subscribes to it, Kbin will then receive new posts from that Lemmy instance for that community.
So if no one on an instance is subscribed to that community, new posts won't flow to that instance. And then if you do subscribe to it, the instance will only automatically receive new posts. Federation will not back-fill older content.
@ignirtoq Thank you, Kind of sucks that it doesn't back-log the content.
The biggest downside along with not being able to search for non subscribed groups from another instances. Terrible design decision
One really bad and confusing thing about kbin is there are two searches. There is one at the Magazine list and another behind the magnifying glass.
The "magazines" only shows communities that someone else on this instance has already subscribed to. So if you search there for something mainstream then chances are you'll find it. But something niche from a small server, like theonion@midwest.social won't show up as no one from here has subscribed to it before so kbin.social doesn't know about it.
The magnifying glass search is the way to subscribe to a community that kbin doesn't know about yet. If you put in theonion@midwest.social into the search (NB, no ! on the start, like lemmy does it) then you'll be subscribed to it straight away and from then on it'll show up in the Community List for everyone.
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