@Lumb @scarly 1. You are following more people, so your instance's problem should clear up even quicker, since my federated timeline would be limited by my lack of following people. So the fact that I didn't have a problem is really strong evidence that you didn't damage the network itself, just your instance's glitching out for some reason.
2. The first thing you're supposed to test is if a bug is reproducible, so when I say it works fine on my machine I'm not telling you you're wrong at all. I'm giving you data to help you decide on what your next approach should be.
3. The world must seem like your enemy, if even my post insulted you, but I swear we're just people (with a few assholes among us), who occasionally try to help.
Basically the federated timeline is all me. I’m not seeing anyone else’s toots for long stretches of time. Also my notifications are backed up by a minute or two.
So I’ll get a notification in the browser a while before it actually shows up in my notifications tab.