Federation happens automatically when a user types the remote community into their instance's search page.
Try putting this into your instance's search page, including the exclamation mark: [email protected]
It might take a couple of seconds or require a page refresh, but it should then show up no-probs. If no one on your instance does this, you will never be able to see that content on your instance.
This is good to know. I have thought about self hosting my own instance for the fun of it, and to learn how it works, but it looks like the experience won't be as complete if I like to browse through threads from communities I'm not subscribed to (like I would have browsed through All on reddit).
Yes, but there's something you can do. Create a secondary "utility user" called @discovery or whatever you want. And use that user to subscribe to any even remotely popular remote communities.
I'm in the same boat. Having a small instance for me and my friends might create an echo chamber, at least initially. My current strategy is to browse all on kbin and sdf's Lemmy and find interesting communities to subscribe to.
This does cause an issue of duplicate communities though -- pawb.social has tech but so do other Lemmy instances. I have not found a good way to group them and de-dup them yet.
Does kbin / kbin.social provide a local tab? I think it'd be cool to be able to just see stuff from one's own instance, but I haven't seen anything like that here
I'm not sure this is what I'm looking for. I don't want to turn off federation, I just want to be able to read stuff just on my home server without all the clutter sometimes (it might be the same thing, I don't know)