I’ve seen this mentioned a few times already: people wondering why certain communities don’t show up in their instance. You need to first search for that community via the magnifying glass icon and type in “!communityname@instance.domain”
Notice the exclamation mark at the beginning. Might take a few seconds. This will teach your instance about the remote community.
From what I heard, no (but the reverse is possible)
I think I’m gonna use kbin, seems more featureful, including good integration with the fediverse.