I haven't been able to subscribe to any communities hosted on kbin instances. I can see the communities, but they stay at "subscribe pending" and the posts never show up.
I can still see posts and comments from kbin users as long as they're on a Lemmy community, so I know it's not being blocked on my end.
I heard that there was a "temporary outage" regarding federation with kbin.social a while back, so I've been waiting for months for it to start working, but it just never did. I've also tried subscribing to other kbin instances and they haven't worked either...
So has this just always been broken for everybody?
Or is there something I can change on my end to get it working?
If your instance was set up a while ago and nginx was used the config might need updating because the old config wasn't compatible with kbin. After that it worked well for me. The only thing I notice is that old posts are not synced after subscribing. Only new posts get added.
I think this is the solution to the problem OP is having, the same thing happened to my instance since I used configs before this was spotted, after changing it to match this commit, the subscriptions work again, but only new posts come in.