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.
This is the tricky part - you will be remote-invisible until someone from the other instance(s) follow you for any of your content to show up in their Explore (hashtags, etc.) feed for other people to discover you. Pixelfed.social is the biggest hub by far so getting on that radar is key (much like joining a small Mastodon instance and you want to be "seen" on mastodon.social e.g. - same processes).
So you want to follow yourself from your pixelfed.social account to your own domain.com, so that your domain.com profile is seeded (federated) for other pixelfed.social users to discover as they browse. It's a hack but there's no other real way given how "opt-in" federation works, unless you have pre-existing friends on pixelfed.social who subscribe to your domain.com for you right away so you don't have to hack it to get started.