Good work upgrading! I can’t imagine it being too easy with a big instance.
I had issues with comments not federating to my own instance before this update (showing 0 for hours). Opening up this up now showed most of them right away if not all. Hopefully that means 0.18.1 fixed a fair few issues people had with federation.
It was a fun experience trying to get to all work. I did originally try on my raspberrypi but I ended up just giving up on that due to the issues you mentioned. But it’s nice to have my own instance, and slowly populating the all feed with new subscriptions and well I owned the domain va11halla.bar I had to use it for my name.