From what I can tell, and don't quote me on this, this doesn't really matter.

Most of my subs I have on my own instance say subscribe pending but I still get the posts federated. Not sure what the reason is, would love if somebody could chime in.

On my own end, I can get Lemmy 0.18 instances such as .ml to un-pend by unsubscribing and re-subscribing, but Lemmy 0.17 instances such as .world or beehaw always show up as pending (despite sending posts over)

I think it's just the acknowledgements those instances are supposed to send to your instance being lost in transit. Everything seems to work fine otherwise

For those that need an answer. You can fix the message by unsubscribing and subscribing from the individual community page. It won't work from the Communities listing page

I mod two communities. There's nothing available that shows me "pending" subscriptions in order to approve/deny them. Just click the button again so it reverts back to a "Subscribe" button, then click it again. Keep doing this until it says "Joined" instead of "Pending." You may have to do it a dozen times, and may have to leave it for an hour/day and come back and try again.

Just ignore it, you’re not missing any functionality. Just some kind of bug.

I'm not 100% sure this is correct because I haven't looked at the protocol or implementations in detail yet, but I can offer some educated guesses.

"Pending" implies that you're waiting for some remote service, likely the other instance, to confirm that the subscription went through.

I can think of a few reasons why an instance may never send confirmation or why the message may not update:

• that instance defederated your instance, meaning you can see them, but they refuse to see you. This makes sense for beehaw, given that they've defederated several instances, including lemmy.world
• that instance hit an error
• the request or response was lost somewhere along the network
• your client, that is, the website or mobile app you're using, has a cached state of pending and never updated it even though it received confirmation

Maybe I'll dive into things tonight and get more info. Or i might forget. We'll see 😅

ima newb. joined today. been scrolling for great many hours. cool platform. thanks everyone.

i also see lots of "PENDING". can only guess what that means.