2 or 3.
Same issue here. I already made a post about it on my instance, too. At first, I was sure that it was a configuration issue on my instance, but I just discovered that it works fine when subscribing to Communities on lemmy.world and other instances.
Are there actual reasons to do this, though?
Works for me. But I'm on a different instance...
This is why I first opted for KBin instead of Lemmy for my own instance, as the admins of lemmy.ml are also the lead developers of Lemmy. It just felt unethical.
I didn't like KBin and ended up with Lemmy anway, as FOSS software like this isn't really political, as it can be forked, if necessary.
I'm still against ideology like that and I will remove the heart shaped donation icon from the top bar of my instance soon, so that the devs will not make any money from my instance.
This was my first thought, as well.