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.
His last post was 4 days ago so there hasn't been anything new enough to send to you. Try following his Mastodon account, he uses it a lot more.
Someone you followed may have boosted them, old posts will show up if the boost happens after you follow them.
So it won't even send me any of his profile info until after he posts something?
IDK, how software fetches profile info is implementation dependent, so you'd have to dive into the source code or wait for him to post and see if you get it.
Okay, thanks for your help. Honestly, it's a bit of a relief as I didn't want a bunch of data I'm not using filling up my server.
yeah, only new stuff is sent over.