I had this extensively before instances switched to 0.18 but some people say they see it even with 0.18.1

No. I was browsing for communities, seeing how active they were in the process. One website showed the community being official coming from reddit but lemmy showed no content so I was very surprised with these results.

I’ve heard content may not be completely federated unless someone from my instance subscribes to that community or to that instance. Could this be the case here?

In any case i have to always double check because i can’t fully trust my own instance to show real community activity.

that’s awesome! so much more than i was hoping for. thank you and to the people who made this.

If on desktop, you need to interact with content from inside your own instance. For example for you, your own instance is lemmy.ml you visit this website and then subscribe to communities either on your server or another server(important: without leaving the tab of your instance in the browser! Otherwise it will say you need to log in). You find communities either on the All tab or in the communities search at the top of the website.

In the future all this will become easier like it did for Mastodon but for now we have these growing pains.

For now your best bet is to do the community search in the section at the top of the web ui. for example, choose “All” in the filter and search for “gaming” and it will find all gaming communities on all the intances.

The sub you’re on right now also displays on the right hand side of the post, you can also press subscribe there.