it may be related to the older lemmy version.
the latest lemmy version has changed how metadata is fetched for posts coming from federation and it will no longer be processed while receiving the federated activity, instead it will be processed in the background. sometimes, metadata for urls cannot be fetched within the time limit and then the post will not federate properly if it's not happening in the background.
"Link in the post" is already in the post itself, and it's a different one