There could normally be some latency waiting on a server response, but you'll still get the feed even though it says pending. There is a problem where it can get stuck in a pending state, but I thought it was resolved in the recent 0.18.0 update for Lemmy. Though some admins are holding back until 0.18.1. Lemmy.ml has updated, but maybe both the local and remote instances need to have the new version. Kind of a bummer, I really want the fixes in 0.18.0, but I think the admin of my login instance is holding out for the 0.18.1 version.