So, to explain in more detail: I read about a new community on newcommunities and I decided to search for it so that it started federating with Kbin.
However, when I visit the community on lemmy.world, there are already 32 posts from before the community became visible on kbin, but I can only see the posts that were made after I “discovered” the community on Kbin.
Correct. If someone on that instance, or who is federated with the content on that instance, can do it. If you use a lemmy.world account and upvote all the posts they should federate to your instance.