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?
For me, being stuck at 'Subscribe Pending' does seem to happen for KBIN mags, but it isn't exclusive to them. Whenever it happens, it does the mad thing of bringing everything though up to the point I tried to subscribe, but nothing after.
To fix it, you can often - but not always - go to the source Mag or Community, and find a semi-recent post from after you subscribed, and copy the absolute link (e.g. https://kbin.social/m/science/t/383186/Visualizing-the-mysterious-dance-Quantum-entanglement-of-photons-captured-in), then go to your instance and post that in the Search field. And then the change the thing your searching for from 'Communities' to 'Posts', and then wait a bit, and then click the link if it shows up.
This tends to force through the change past 'Pending', and from then things will start turning up.