Lemmy - Increasing Federation

I’m hosting my own Lemmy instance and so far everything has been pretty smooth. However I’m noticing some issues with specific instances, communities, or comments not showing up through my own instance.

I had added instances to the allow list initially but I cleared those so that it’s wide open now. I have an account on lemm.ee and I use that periodically to compare feeds, and like I said sometimes a post or comment is missing, actually I often see a comment that looks like it’s responding to a another comment, but I cannot see the parent comment.

Initially I took my admin account and subscribed to all of the most popular communities I could find, but that seems to have left some holes.

Is there a way to force federation with more Lemmy instances?

Thank you for any direction you can provide.