iiiiiiitttttttttttt

Its called fetching it.

No. I was specifically thinking of webfinger. That's Lemmy's (ActivityPub) way of checking if an id (user or community) exists or not. Then, an instance may "read" the remote community using its outbox (if requested), and a snapshot of that remote community would now exist in the local instance. That "snapshot" doesn't get updated unless another attempt is made to view the now known remote community, AND a certain period have passed (It was 24 hours the last time I looked). In that second time, a user may actually need to make a second request (refresh/retry) to see the updates, and may need to do that after a few seconds (depending on how busy/fast instances are).

If at least one user however subscribes to that remote community, then the remote instance live-federates all updates from that community to the subscribed user's local instance, and all these issues/complications go away.