Yep you're right. And I've discovered that, in order to see posts from a community, at least one user in your instance needs to be subscribed to a community to view it.
Would be nice if someday the browse functionality provided by some sites was integrated into Lemmy but for now I had to go through and manually subscribe to a bunch of things.
I'd use a scraper but there's a lot of content I don't care to see right now, and I'm assuming subscribing comes with a small storage cost, so may as well avoid it for now
Do you know how much data is put onto the local device when subscribing to all these communities? Ballpark is it in the MBs? GBs?
Trying to determine whether discovering things I don't want is worth it