Is this accurate on how it works? My assumption was a user would have to be subscribed to a remote community on their local instance for that local instance to pull posts/votes/comments from the remote instance. It’s not like everything is replicated everywhere.

Try the Lemmy ansible installer. It’s way simpler and once you get the hang of it you can reinstall it within a minute. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible