Hey! I'm keeping this as it's sharing knowledge with new users from Reddit. However, in future please find another community to post this on, because it is not related to the lemmy.world instance specifically.

It means that federation with that community is slow or broken.

A couple of mine show the same thing, but those communities show up in my subscribed feed, so it seems like it still works even though it says "pending".

It's more of a system lag, you're subscribed, your local host just hasn't confirmed it yet.

Going to chime in and agree with others that it's just that the servers are lagging at the moment (especially the main Lemmy instance). Several, for me, said "subscribe pending" initially yesterday, but I logged on this morning and found that I was subscribed.

don’t worry. I have/had the same state to different lemmy.ml communities. The subscription is pending but the feeds are coming in. In fact that lemmy.ml ist overloaded the sync ist not always working properly

Usually, just go back to your home page and it'll be in your subscription list. Come back a bit later and you'll see it say joined.

if it does not fix in a few hours just click to cancel and try again