Okay so notes on last night's troubleshooting.
It seems to only be *certain accounts* on octodon.social that I cannot follow (or remote follow).
It seems that the entirety of pixie.town's userbase is un-followable besides this weird bot federation account: @pixie.town
I fixed my shit.
So, on servers with `AUTHORIZED_FETCH` or `LIMITED_FEDERATION_MODE`, they fall back to this weird mode of having a fake user that acts like a access controlled gateway to the entire instance. The username is something like `domain.tld@domain.tld`. You can find these for pretty much every mastodon server, and they appear as a bot account. These are known as `instance-wide actors`.
So these get generated based on your `LOCAL_DOMAIN` value, upon running `rails setup:db` .
So what happened, is I likely deployed my very first app without having `LOCAL_DOMAIN` set initially.
Because of this, my instance couldn't be communicated with via an `instance-wide actor` because the value it had was either un-initialized or invalid.
Sure enough it was invalid. This can be seen both by querying the postgres database and curling the `https://domain.tld/actor#main-key` contents.
Querying the db showed:
```
# SELECT username FROM accounts WHERE id=-99;
username
----------------
localhost:3000
```
Which corresponded with the value in the curl
```
"preferredUsername": "localhost:3000",
```
So a quick fix was to connect to psql and run the following update: UPDATE accounts SET username = 'destituent.social' WHERE id=-99;
Now I can toot at my friends over on pixie.town!
Hopefully I didn't burn too many of your CPU cycles @f0x and @forestjohnson thanks!
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20820
> **USABILITY: init db before configuration is completed causes silent failures / broken instance #20820 **
@forestjohnson wow, much appreciated. I couldn't have figured out how to work this into a good report myself, I'm gonna reference this going forward. 🥰