Not that I'm aware of. Hopefully we get these tools with time. But as I understand it federation is basically a push action, the community host instance sends the updates out to all the instances with users subscribed. The instances don't send a request asking for updates as far as I know.
Something like that. I have heard basically that but if you go look at a new community that no one has subscribed to then it still shows you posts so there must be more to it.