My cloud hosts use heavily customized centos Nginx lemps, so it's hard to explain it.
Each site I manually set up gets its own php executable .sock with its own user and permission group. There is no www-php.
The main lemp I use is optimized for Wordpress, so I thought it wasn't maybe something to do with that so I set a non Wordpress Lemp up and the configs are about the same.
All php and everything else seems to work brilliantly as it is but not flarum. And it only seems to affect sessions
I'm at work now, but tonight I'll post all my config files. If anyone is willing to help.
I actually love flarum so much that I paid a few hundred dollars for another cloud vps to mess around with to get this working instead of paying for a ip.board or xenforo license
I'll give someone access to the ssh on the vps if they wanna look around at the set up