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.
You need to follow people for their posts to federate to your server. Posts won't federate until you're following a user and they make a post, or boost a post. Also, old posts won't federate unless they are boosted/reblogged/shared. This is also how Mastodon works.
I recommend following as many people as you can, especially people who boost a lot, and following the people who are being boosted.
It takes a lot of effort to start the process up.
Also make sure that the AP and federation features are turned on in the env file, as i believe by default they are off with pixelfed.
There's already several people in my global feed that I have not followed. And you can see in my photo, I've followed Dansup but his profile is still not showing any posts, followers, or even a profile picture.
I also have several posts that predate my server in the global feed from accounts I have not followed.
Not saying you're wrong, just trying to understand.
How am I supposed to follow anyone when I can't even find them?
I did.
I don't really care to browse other profiles, I mostly just want to ensure mine is visible to others. But it is sad to learn that federation works this way, as it makes standing up a server for a single person kind of a waste of time.
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.