Federation woes
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You need to follow people for their posts to federate to your server.
There's already several people in my global feed that I have not followed. And you can see in my photo that I've followed Dansup but his profile is still not showing any posts or even a profile picture.
old posts won't federate unless they are boosted/reblogged/shared
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.
make sure that the AP and federation features are turned on in the env file
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.
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And you can see in my photo that I’ve followed Dansup but his profile is still not showing any posts or even a profile picture.
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.
I also have several posts that predate my server in the global feed from accounts I have not followed.
Someone you followed may have boosted them, old posts will show up if the boost happens after you follow them.
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This is an excellent explanation! Nice job simplifying it.
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So it won't even send me any of his profile info until after he posts something?
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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 get it.
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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.
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I mostly just want to ensure mine is visible to others.
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.
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yeah, only new stuff is sent over.
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Hey, I did the same thing recently! Set it up on my own server, and after a week, I'm starting to see new accounts being added to my explore feed. But there's no user count.
It's an annoying experience and I'm not fully sure how to resolve it yet, nor have I dung into it.
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Thanks for the validation
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Yes, i really wish there was a good way to do pixelfed relaying.
