When I subscribe in a community in another instance it always says "pending " in yellow. I can comment but I am not officially subscribed to the community. E.g. subscribing to “!nostupidquestions@lemmy.ml”
Maybe I just need to wait.
Edit: It says “subscribe pending” in yellow
A note for folks who didn’t know this - if you’re using kbin, when you search for lemmy communities to subscribe to you should remove the ! from the search query (eg, use nostupidquestions@lemmy.ml instead of !nostupidquestions@lemmy.ml). This way you will find the community instead of related posts.