I have this problem also. I think it’s pretty poor of buddypress.
I tried setting the time zone in wordpress to New York, setting the time earlier so it set it to “5 hours”, realizing that, from LA, being 9 hours, maybe going further would solve it.
Setting to Moscow Russia I figured would fix the problem, but then it just says “sometime ago”
I NEED to have Times working, because everything is archived through time on my site, (cough cough, @djpaul 👿