I got content updating now. I had to add a nginx deployment with the standard nginx.conf loaded through a config map then used nginx-ingress to proxy the proxy container so that it would be live. Comments and posts are not syncing yet, but I think that may just need some time for the instances to sort themselves out with my instance. I'll update if I can get comment / posting working or not.

Yeah seems like they are pretty strict on what you are doing, i assume not having a business on the account affects it too. Maybe depends on who you get to reply to your ticket as well lol

Lucky SES rejected my request lol

Thanks for the link. I recently did something similar, this fixed my federation issue allowing me to post / comment / upvote. I am wondering now if there is an issue with the proxy config that prevents subscriptions from going through.

I avoided lemny.ml, doing lemmy.world and a few others and those won't subscribe after retrying a bunch either.

I avoided lemmy.ml since I read some controversy with admins of it, does having it not blocked but not pulling from it cause any issues?

I am subscribing but they all show pending subscription, which I read doesn't matter usually but a first time setup private instance I was thinking that it might.

I had an AI write 95% of my kurbenetes config. I had this at one point, it is likely you are not proxying (usually nginx) the Lemmy backend to /api and there are are other endpoints that need mapped to it too.