Instance not retrieving comments?

I stood up my own instance, and it's federating (kind of?) but none of the posts are showing up with their comments. If I look on the main instance I can see the comments but not on mine.

This also applies to sticky posts not being stickied when i view from my own instance. Is this a bug, a misconfiguration on my end, or a result of servers being overloaded?

EDIT: In case anyone else has this, the issue was that I made the boneheaded mistake of just using the docker container for postgres i already had running without checking versions. Lemmy needs postgres15 and i gave it postgres11, causing comments not to be saved in the db and all sorts of funky issues.