Continuation of my last federation update post with some updated info
Hexbear
After we got removed from the hexbear allowlist I talked with one of their admins about it. Theyre running a poll currently for their users to determine if they want to refederate or not with opinion in that poll seeming to be mostly in favor
It is very likely we will be federating with Hexbear again. However, things such as political communities will be hidden from our feeds by default meaning you wont see those posts unless you explicitly subscribe to those communities (so if youre just browsing the all feed you wont see any of them)
In terms of comments made in other instances that aren't hexbear or programming.dev (e.g. lemm.ee) that is up to the admins of those communities to handle (and if an instance has defederated from hexbear such as lemmy.world threads in their instance will have no hexbear members on them)
If you participate in the hexbear instance make sure to follow their code of conduct and dont participate in communities that are labelled as being for hexbear members only (I should be hiding any that exist)
If theres a community I missed that should be hidden reach out to me with it and ill hide it. Hidden communities will show up with no posts when you look at them without subscribing
And to leave off this update ill give you guys a couple hexbear communities that might be relevant to you once federation is up again
https://hexbear.net/c/gamedev https://hexbear.net/c/technology https://hexbear.net/c/games
Thanks for the detailed explanation. This helps. I think this is just my misunderstanding of how "hidden" communities work. I always thought that when a community is hidden, its posts just won't show up in the Local/All/etc timelines. I wasn't aware that community posts are hidden when you navigate to the community directly.
I use the Lemmy RSS feeds from openrss.org, which are different (and a little more robust) than the RSS feeds offered on the Lemmy instance. Some of the rss content has embedded links that go directly to a Lemmy community URL. So if I'm not subscribed to a hidden community and navigate to it, it'll just show an empty page of posts, similar to your screenshot above.
So appears that this isn't a problem with the RSS reader, but this behavior of a hidden community can surprise a person when they navigate to one and see no posts.
Yeah its not ideal but its due to this being a feature programmed in the lemmy backend but not the lemmy frontend (I had to manually do http calls to get things hidden). In the new frontend im making for the instance itll be much more apparent that a community is hidden rather than just having no posts
Ill see if I can get it working better with various aspects like that as well while developing
Ok cool. No worries. Thanks for helping me understand. 👍