What’s strange is that following communities works fine on Calckey.world, which runs the 1.0 software. So I guess a recent update must have broken something.
I think the antennas are useful even as-is. Simply setting one up that is posts-only (no replies) with some sports communities from Lemmy and some Mastodon sports news accounts ends up working quite nicely.
If development continues well I can see it becoming a very good platform.