You are correct in that the lack of posts for your instance would be because nobody on your instance has subscribed. The first time that somebody on your instance searches the community, it will fetch the most recent 20 (iirc) posts and pull them in, but without comments or votes. Unfortunate side effects of how federation is implemented in lemmy… Once there is a user subbed to a community on your instance, everything from that point forward will federate over as normal. I am sorry that these kinds of federation quirks are impacting you this way! I also wish that I could create an instance-agnostic url to point this post at, but unfortunately that is also not possible within lemmy. Instead, I have to settle for using the instance-agnostic community links in the post body.

The rationale for letting show-specific communities host their own discussion threads is to help introduce those communities to a wider audience in the fediverse. The lemmy and lemmy-compatible userbase is small enough that splitting across threads/communities seemed counter-productive.

I think it is a fair criticism to say that doing it this way is dumb. At the end of the day, I opted against centralizing all the discussions to this community to allow for smaller communities to try and grow/earn users. However, that is a judgement call I made, and I am far from infallible. I am open to other users telling me that this isn’t how this should work as well.

I do want to reassure you and others that if a community-run series like this is overly late or stops making the threads, then I am more than willing to reassume creating the posts in this community, and it is something that I keep track of on my end.

Edit:

All that said, people did basically use this thread last week as an impromptu discussion thread. I am not going to remove comments from these threads (within the rules anyway). So, feel free to use it that way, but know that it won’t be the primary endpoint for discussion.