Hello everyone, I joined lemmy.zip today. I've been using lemmy.world for the past month and have decided to move out to the fringe. This instance looks amazing and I'm happy to have joined. Over at lemmy.world I mod a small community [email protected] and since its a small niche community lemmy.zip hasn't been syncing with it which is expected. When I try to subscribe to my community however I get an error and I was wondering if its just me. I've posted the error which seems to be an issue with the json format. I believe both instances are running the same version of lemmy so i wouldn't expect them to have issues fetching posts from each other.
@tamlyn has pretty much answered the question, but yes this is how federation works to stop instances from unnecessarily pulling data from communities nobody has subscribed to yet.
Once you've searched for and subscribed to the community, it will then federate with the server and all should be good! I'm sure you've seen that Lemmy.world has had a fair bit of downtime recently so just be mindful that having a community there, and Lemmy.world going down, may cause issues with federation, at least until the devs can implement fixes to the lemmy software.