I noticed the same thing. There is an open issue on the Lemmy backend GitHub about broken federation in the 0.19 release here
Some instances are running older 0.18 versions which don't seem to be affected. Restarting the processes every few hours might help.
Too bad plugin hybrids are not more available. My family uses a 10 year old Chevy Volt as our main vehicle. It gets 38 miles/60km on battery which covers most of our driving. Only longer trips on the weekends or the occasional road trip uses any gas. The dehumidifier I run to keep the basement dry uses more electricity than the car. It does ok in snow with winter tires, as long as the snow isn't too deep. I'm in rural great lakes region in a snow belt.