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Ok I might be semi misunderstanding what your rss reader does by what youre saying but ill go through everything that happens with this feature

For anything relating to rss readers im using fluent reader as that is what I use

Typical Behaviour (In P.D)

When someone navigates to a community in programming.dev and the community is hidden they are shown this

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With the no posts text appearing on the left but the stats on the right having posts

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Then when they subscribe to that community they are shown this

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With all of the posts now appearing

RSS Feed behaviour

When you look at a community page initially (either from manually going to it or getting sent to it by some other thing) you get the same view as in the default behaviour

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if you then right click on the rss symbol beside the post sort dropdown and click copy link you get a link to the rss feed for that community

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If you then add that link to your reader it will show posts in it

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In terms of getting to the content, direct links to posts still work while the community is hidden

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mark@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Thanks for the detailed explanation. This helps. I think this is just my misunderstanding of how “hidden” communities work. I always thought that when a community is hidden, its posts just won’t show up in the Local/All/etc timelines. I wasn’t aware that community posts are hidden when you navigate to the community directly.

I use the Lemmy RSS feeds from openrss.org, which are different (and a little more robust) than the RSS feeds offered on the Lemmy instance. Some of the rss content has embedded links that go directly to a Lemmy community URL. So if I’m not subscribed to a hidden community and navigate to it, it’ll just show an empty page of posts, similar to your screenshot above.

So appears that this isn’t a problem with the RSS reader, but this behavior of a hidden community can surprise a person when they navigate to one and see no posts.

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- Ategon@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yeah its not ideal but its due to this being a feature programmed in the lemmy backend but not the lemmy frontend (I had to manually do http calls to get things hidden). In the new frontend im making for the instance itll be much more apparent that a community is hiden rather than just having no posts
  
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  - mark@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Ok cool. No worries. Thanks for helping me understand. 👍
    
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