Do you see your instance on https://lemmy.world/instances or other servers /instances? That's typically a good sign that your server is federated.
A new instance doesn't federate on its own. It needs to discover the other servers. Use something like https://lemmyverse.net/ to make links with your home server and visit the other instances. Subscribe to a few and you'll start getting those posts.
No worries! All tests welcome in this thread. Do you think it's your server host? What's the output of the "date" command?
That's very strange. Once a post gets federated, can a user not delete it? Can it only be removed with a purge from the instance admin?
It's interesting that your post says "in 1 hour" as the timestamp. What would be causing that?
I see 5 hours ago. That's interesting that it would put a timestamp before the thread was posted.
Thank you everyone! Amazing to see this working with all the other instances. Honestly surprised I didn't have to do too much config after using this post as a rough guide. Just took time for everything to start downloading properly, especially with the chaos of the July 1st exodus.