I looked up a list of Lemmy World instances and signed up for a bunch, but how do I see everything at once in one app instead of downloading one for each instance? I am new to what the kids call "federation." Thank you.
After you verify they are working feel free to unsubscribe of course.
Edit: after reading it again I'm a bit confused to what your problem is, so here is a quick run down of jow things should work.
From your own account, use the search bar to search for a community in another instance, there try to see button for about community (it might be different on each app) and lastly press subscribe. From yhere, all your subscriptions should appear the same regardless of where they come from.
I've posted a top level comment with all the concepts I think could be useful to better understand the whole Fediverse and Lemmy thing: if ,after that, you have any more questions you can reply to it and I'll try to help you out.
I'd link it directly but currently comments links can get messy.
Not really, you probably can already see the posts on your frontpage feed (which is exclusive for your subscribed communities) and it also already should appear on your subscribed list.
And as the other user said, it is a bug that it appears as pending. At least on desktop when it days that I reload the page and press the subscribe button twice and it fixes, alternatively on the app "connect for lemmy" I have never seen the issue.
But regardless it's not really a problem