Hi Lemmy community,

I’m running into some strange federation issues with my instance (buddyverse.one) and could use some advice. A few months ago, I shut down my instance due to storage constraints and deleted the database, as there was no clear way to remove old posts to free up space. Today, I recreated the instance from scratch, but I’m facing several problems:

1. Subscription Pending Issue: When I try to subscribe to communities (both from my instance and from lemmy.ml to a community on my instance), it gets stuck on “Subscription pending.” It’s not resolving even after waiting.

2. Old Content Persisting: My profile on other instances (e.g., lemmy.world) still shows old posts and comments from before I shut down the instance. It seems no Lemmy instances removed my content when I deleted my database.

3. Old Replies Resurfacing: I commented on a thread recently, and it pulled up old replies people made to my comments from months ago, before the shutdown.

It looks like the federation didn’t properly handle the deletion of my instance’s content, and now it’s causing issues with the new setup. Has anyone dealt with something similar? How can I:

• Fix the “Subscription pending” issue for community subscriptions?
• Ensure old posts/comments are removed from other federated instances?
• Prevent old replies from resurfacing on new comments?

Any guidance or troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated. I’m running the latest Lemmy version and have checked the basic federation settings (enabled, no strict allowlist). Thanks in advance!

Instance: buddyverse.one
Lemmy Version: 0.19.11 Logs: Happy to share relevant logs if needed—just let me know what to look for.