Pending subscription to communities - Lemmy.world

Am I the only one with a bunch of communities I’d like to join but with a status still on “Subscribe pending”. I’m still new to all this and I’m really loving it so far, but man, so much stuff is confusing and counter-intuitive. Isn’t the point of having federated instances being able to talk to each other? [https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9933451e-7a83-41b8-b128-e935d1a06659.png]