Kind of falls under the ‘Too Afraid to Ask’ category, I guess, but I’ve been curious about this for a while. Did something actually happen at some point, or was this just a procedural thing that wasn’t ever followed up on?
It’s mildly annoying given how large they are.
As we worked out in the comments, it’s not actually a federation issue, it’s a synchronization time issue… there’s a ~5 hour delay before we see posts from lemmy.world users (only l.w, as far as I can tell - doesn’t apply to other instances.) Might be because of l.w’s size, or some other factor, but it’s interesting to note.