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.
Incidentally, this is why Mastodon relays exist.
Yes, i really wish there was a good way to do pixelfed relaying.