Stood up my PixelFed server yesterday. Federation seems to just...not be happening. I manually added a bunch of servers in the "instances" tab but they all say 0 users. If I search for exact profile names, I can find them but they're completely empty. Pictured is my server on the left and .social on the right. The weird part is that a handful of posts do come through. Like, maybe a dozen in the last 24 hours in my global feed.
I made a test post and someone on .social followed me, so they can obviously see me, but when I went to follow them back, their profile was also completely empty.
Is there something I need to do to "kickstart" this into gear? Do I need to just continue waiting? It's been ~16 hours at this point.
I've had the file system permissions wrong and that lead to all kinds of unrelated issues. But yeah the number of users and incoming posts are supposed to not increase unless you subscribe to users. Just adding instance URLs doesn't do anything. And it seems to federate new posts only, not the entire history of a user.