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.
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.
This is an excellent explanation! Nice job simplifying it.