I've been reading tons of the commits and github issues. Much has improved.
Supposedly there are a lot of improvements to federation under the hood, so we should be seeing fewer delayed posts, less mismatching vote-counts across instances (I noticed voting now does a loading animation, seems it now makes sure it goes through), and comments should no longer fail to federate sometimes.
Links that would take you off-instance should now get automatically converted to ones that don't. Even ones that would take you to Kbin. And just writing the name should be enough to turn it into a link. Lets try: !fitmoe@lemmy.world, !titanfall@lemmy.world, !Fediverse@kbin.social
Edit: HELL YEAH! It works!
I will also be sending you a buck or two your way on patreon. Thanks for the quick update to v18!