I just realized that it might not be a technical issue that I can’t subscribe to any kbin.social magazines from my one-person lemmy instance but that I might not be on the whitelist.

Every time I try to subscribe to any magazine I get “Subscription Pending”. First I thought it was some technical issue, cloudflare, server overloaded, etc. especially because I had similar issues with lemmy instances.

Today I updated to lemmy 0.18.0 and all the lemmy servers started letting me subscribe, but not /kbin but perhaps there is something incompatible. But I found threads about people subscribing to kbin from lemmy successfully. And then I was reading https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/93050/How-do-I-request-federation and then it dawned to me that I might just either not be on a whitelist or even worse on a black list.

How is it supposed to work?

Is this the reason why my single-user instance can’t subscribe to any https://kbin.social magazine? I’m not even getting an error, just “Subscription Pending”. That sounds kind of broken and different to how Mastodon is dealing with that issue.

Do I somewhere need to apply to be able to subscribe to any /kbin magazines? If so where do I do that? Is there a email I can sent my application to? Or is the idea that if you have a single user instance you create a new user on every instance to find some meta-magazine where you can ask to be able to subscribe to a magazine on that instance?

Or are small instances not part of the design?

I also see that my comments in threads of other instances which kbin federates with don’t show up here either, which is understandable if my instance is banned.