i also noticed a recent sync in-congruence from .ml to .world which indicates some kind of funny business… purposeful or not

This isn’t unique to world or ml. There’s some wonky shit going on with federating across Lemmy at the very least, maybe other parts of the fediverse that I don’t use. On walledgarden there are at least half a dozen instances that are falling in and out of sync with our communities. No one on either side of the connection seems to have an answer for what caused this behavior or how to correct it. Talking to some other instances, we aren’t alone.

The lemmyverse crawler/site has also shown some odd behavior with communities and instances disappearing and reappearing seemingly at random.

I don’t think anything malicious is being done by any of the instances or admins in regards to federation delays.