Federation woes

Adding servers to the federation list is just white-listing them. It’s not actually establishing syndication in any way. You don’t syndicate at the website level, you syndicate at the user level.

The way the system works is, a user on your website subscribes to a user on another website, and from that point forward the remote website starts sending your website that one user’s posts, addressed to any and all users on your website who requested them. Your website then receives and stories a copy of all future posts from the remote user, and adds them to the subscribing users’ feeds.

This subscription is very much like a magazine subscription. Your site does not receive the back catalogue. It does not automatically receive other magazines (users) published (hosted) by the same publisher (website). You only get what has been requested, from the point the request has been accepted onward.

There is no canonical fediverse that you can just see. It’s not a centralized system, which means there’s no source of truth to tap into. It’s a mass, opt-in content syndication technology, where you have direct access to the locally hosted content on the single website you are using. The fact that much of that content originated elsewhere presents the illusion of some centralized whole, but it’s just that: an illusion.

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.