SMB user shares authenticated against Active Directory problem

I’m having an issue, or am slightly confused.

Setup
Nextcloud 22, Windows Server 2019 (Active Directory), Truenas Core (storage)
I have AD integration working fine, can login with no problems with AD users.
I am trying to setup home dire storage on my storage appliance, as my nextcloud instance is hosted on a VPS with minimal storage. The primary gateways of each of my VPS instances have no problems communicating, and I can reach the internal IP of each host from anywhere.

When I setup a share, when I set the host to the ip of the storage server, the share to “testuser” and provide the AD credentials, it works just fine. the problem is that my setup for home directories is x.x.x.x/username
There is no subfolder between, so when I set the ip address of the host, use “/” as the share, and $user as the remote folder, it does not work, and the variables don’t seem to work in the “share” field.

Also I am a little unclear what $user resolves to, as when I look in my user list, it lists the UUID and username… I am home $user just displays the actual username and not the long string.

I will post pictures later when I get home.

Any help is appreciated.