Follow no longer working properly + chaotic fetch

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Hey there,
I seem to have what I would caracterize as federation issues on my solo instance.
Symptoms are:

  • a variable number of posts/boosts by followed accounts never seem to reach my timeline; used to be one here and there, but recently I’ve been seemingly missing all posts from 3 heavy posters; it lasted for a while then somehow came back for one of them, although in a chaotic way
  • the follow mechanism seems to be broken: for 2 of the accounts mentioned above, I unfollowed and then followed again, thinking it might reset some broken link: alas, I was no no longer able to restore the follow! On my end, it says “Request sent!” forever, although on the followed account’s profile on their instance, my account appears in the followers list… I tested by creating an account on a big mastodon instance and noticed the same behaviour: distant says I’m a follower, but local says “request sent!” forever

My instance or account don’t seem to be blocked, I’m still successfully following accounts from those instances.
Also, my instance seems to work correctly with other accounts, it’s not like if my timeline was empty.
Is there a way for me to investigate this any further? Instance logs or browser console don’t seem to have any info on this, or at least I couldn’t find it.
Cheers!

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2

Follow-up on this:

  • I eventually manually updated table following_relationships to change statuses “pending” (1) to “following” (2) for the concerned profiles
  • this (obviously) changed the visible status when checking the followed profiles on my instance to “followed” and added them to the list of people I follow in my profile
  • this also seemed to be enough to reinstate the follow from the feed perspective, because I started to see some posts and reposts from these people in my feed again – not all of them, though, for some reason

I noticed that the following_relationships table contained seemingly all activity related to trying to follow people, so maybe it got corrupt at some point or there is a bug somewhere in the way it is managed, I don’t know.
Now, the fetch part is still chaotic but improving(?): I seem to receive recent activity in a timely manner in most cases, although from time to time I get pretty old posts/reposts (several days to several months) for some reason (might also be related to the DB maintenance tasks I ran shortly after my first post).

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