So aside from waiting for code changes, and pointing out some issues whenever I see them, do you have suggestions for things to do in the meantime?
One seems to be: don't pull in posts manually like that - b/c for one thing, doing it that way means that the comments will never come. Then again, waiting for automated federation syncing seems unlikely to work either. Basically old posts are a lost cause at this point, without admin assistance? Also, I did not notice this at first, but the 3 posts that were already in that community prior to me pulling in the other 2 posts 2 days ago likewise have zero comments in them. Though newer - but not older - voting seems to be taking place, yet starting from a zeroed mark (at the time of the pull?) rather than the proper count on the original instance. e.g. the one by Blaze has 2 (is there a way to view this broken down by up & down separately?) rather than 43, and the dunk_tank one has zero rather than 13, and none of the other posts in that entire community show up. Also the ones that I pulled in have altered counts as well - e.g. the BonesOfTheMoon one now has -2, when the original instance displays -12.
To me this seems an argument to abolish the entire pulling in posts manually feature altogether, until and unless it is changed to pull it in "properly", i.e. with all comments and vote counts intact. Otherwise, this is at minimum highly confusing to people and realistically it is even "misinformation", is it not? e.g., in a hypothetical scenario, a post could have +1000 upvotes, but then someone pulls it in, and it receives 5 downvotes, making the total vote count as "-4" (since it would go through zero I would presume?), which would represent a fully qualitative rather than merely quantitative change in the presentation of such a post. +1000 minus 5 is a totally different "type" of change (barely noticable) than 0 minus 5 (finalizing at outright disliked, yet mostly ignored).
It would be better to have nothing at all than to present things in a confusing manner such as this. Ofc, this is not unique to PieFed - I see similar struggles on my own posts between StarTrek.website and Discuss.Online and Lemmy.World, with variations of vote counts and even number of contents - though the difference is that Lemmy eventually catches up, while it seems that you are saying that PieFed never will?
If space is the limiting issue, then delete everything after a cutoff like 6 months or a year. If network bandwidth is the issue then... I dunno about that, but that's the task that must be worked out. Perhaps Lemmy's upcoming update to 0.19.6 offering batch updates rather than sending each individual one alone will help? This isn't a minor issue imho - this is the kind of stuff that will turn people away. Although if it is on the books to be worked on at a later time that's understandable.
Thank you very much for the suggestion about Safari - I never use that browser, but that's good to know. Fwiw, I also notice the same behavior on Firefox as on Chrome. And on Android Firefox I can go back just fine. So it's not specific to Chrome, and I doubt it is fully specific to Mac though that could be the major one affected.
Btw Lemmy captures the back button properly when you have started to write a comment and it asks you if you are sure that you want to leave and thereby lose that. PieFed I suspect isn't doing quite that but there may be something along the lines of where the focus is placed in order to provide the keyboard shortcuts, or something I dunno. I know basic syntax of HTML, CSS, and a tiny bit of JavaScript, plus Java, C++ and many other languages, but who can keep up with the modern web these days - it's a shitstorm of everything affecting everything else, and even the browsers themselves seem to DGAF to make things "just work" anymore, even on Windows but all the more so everywhere else.:-(
One thing I would argue should be changed is that when making a reply, the Comment box should automatically receive focus. Eventually the entire process of making a comment should be made in-line so as not to disrupt the browsing experience, but that's a small change that should be easy to make and would help. I will keep a list of small things like that in case such suggestions could help:-).
Broaden your mind.
There is more than one Lemmy.ml admin:-).