Right now, NSFW-marked communities are by default(?) not shown by their home instance to non-logged-in users in the community list, and even if you go to them manually no posts are shown.
Fine, but they also aren’t shown to logged in users on other home instances, unless somehow already federated over. If you go to the community’s instance, it can’t tell you are logged in, and if you go to your home instance you can’t see a list of all communities on the other instance that might be available.
Also, older posts that are marked NSFW can’t be gotten by anyone with an account anywhere other than the instance they were posted to. When you subscribe to a community on another instance it federates over a few posts, but to doesn’t request and federate older posts as you try and page back through the archive. The normal solution is to view the old posts on the source instance, but if the community is marked NSFW the source instance won’t let you read the archive there without a local account.
That seems to be related to back-filling old post from before federation was established. That is just not supported and tbh I don’t really see why it should.
I think it should become supported, because as a user I would like to browse these archives. I’m not only interested in new content when I subscribe to a community.
If you subscribe now all other users on your instance can access the content back to the day the first person subscribed, so basically there is an archive. You are just an early adopter and have to live with the consequences of that.
Edit: also, I highly doubt that there even is a NSFW community on Lemmy right now with a huge backlog of content.
But the system should contemplate new instances starting up.
Basically, what I would want is for the next page button on the archive view to go and query for another page of old results from the community’s home server, before telling me I have reached the beginning of time. I don’t expect it to fetch all of history right away, but if I am meant to browse the whole world through the home instance, the home instance should fetch stuff more or less when my browser would if I weren’t browsing through an intermediary.
