I am a big NFL fan, and I found the instance nfl.community. It has a community for each team, as well as a general NFL community. I joined a couple of the communities through my lemmy.world account, but it sees no posts there. I know this instance isn’t defederated from nfl.community, so why wouldn’t I be able to see any posts? I don’t understand, what am I missing?
EDIT: I just reread my post and realized that I didn’t mention that there are tons of post on all the communities on this instance, but nothing shows when logged in through World.
SOLVED: So I had the chance today to reread through this thread and do some digging based on the replies, and I’ve figured out the issue. I went back and looked at nfl.communities, and it turns out that [email protected] is correct - all the posts on that server are by users that are from the alien.top instance. Those aren’t actual users, alien.top just scrapes posts & comments from Reddit. So those aren’t actual posts by Lemmy users, and, as can said, there wouldn’t be any engagement from anyone on that server, because they won’t see my posts & comments. Lastly, I followed a link can posted with bot rules, and one of lemmy.world’s policies is “Bots shall not just be posting Reddit content”, which is exactly what alien.top is doing. That explains why World is blocking all the posts from the nfl.communites server.
Thanks to everyone who responded and helped sort this out!
If you go to that website directly without logging in, do you see the posts? It is entirely possible that there are no posts there - sports communities aren’t getting a lot of non-bot traffic.
If there are posts, how old are they? If you are sorting by top, you won’t see any posts that were posted outside your selected time frame.
If neither of those are the issue, I’d blame Lemmy.world. They have cloudflare rules that block other instances without listing them as defederated. It is possible they’ve moved to a whitelist or some other trust based model that blocks new instances by default.
This is a side effect of them having been under a near constant DDOS and other cyberattacks, and so is definitely defensible, however it ultimately hurt the UX for me to the point that I just moved to a different instance.
I just went and checked without being logged in to lemmy.world, and the latest post from nfl.community/c/nfl is 5 minutes ago, the one under that is 37 minutes ago. This seems to be a pretty active server, which is one of the reasons why I want to subscribe to communities on it.
I’m assuming this is a lemmy.world issue, which is why I’m posting here. I’m hoping that it’s just some mistake, and that there’s something that can be done, because I don’t want to move instances again. But it’s that important to me.