767e2ed4-8089-40ab-92a8-7fb2204b20bd-image.png

I thought that if I entered a Fediverse address here, like ‘@FrankM@nrw.social,’ it would follow that user, and their posts would then appear in the corresponding category.

But that’s not happening. There’s also no meaningful error message. The actor you see in the image probably appears because I entered an incorrect address.

Does this feature need to be enabled on the Fediverse instance ‘nrw.social’?

Who can help?

  • freamon@community.nodebb.org
    1·
    15 hours ago

    Yeah, as mentioned - Lemmy is often quite bad at sending the ‘Accept’ back for a Follow. It’s particularly the case if the instance hasn’t heard of you before, because in the process of fetching your user and instance details, it ‘forgets’ about the Accept. Within Lemmy, everyone’s sort of got into the habit of ‘Subscribe / Unsubscribe / Subscribe’. (where the first ‘subscribe’ lets them get your details, and the second one actually gets an ‘Accept’ back.)

    PieFed is more reliable at sending ‘Accept’ back, so it’s maybe useful to check your logic from this end with a community from there, e.g. https://piefed.social/c/antisocialmedia

  • eeeee@community.nodebb.org
    1·
    18 hours ago

    I think some of the words, make ActivityPub more complicated to understand. Like what is an Actor ? This may be basic to some, but Im still not sure what an Actor is in this context, and why that word was used. Would be grateful if anyone can explain in one line :)

  • rimu@community.nodebb.org
    1·
    1 day ago

    It’s automatic. But you might need to refresh the page before you see the result. Following an actor involves sending a follow activity and then waiting for an accept activity to be sent back. In Lemmy it should be sent almost immediately.

    Some personal Mastodon accounts have manual approval of followers but that doesn’t apply here. Still, the same communication happens under the hood.

    • arachnibot@community.nodebb.org
      1·
      17 hours ago

      @FrankM Running into the same problem on my end (2 days and it seems my follow is stuck). Did you try to follow a non-group account when you got the ‘null’ actor on your list too? I get the feeling it’s related to our endless pending on lemmy communities and such

      • julian@community.nodebb.org
        1·
        16 hours ago

        @arachnibot happy to take a closer look, since the category sync functionality should be working but might have broken in the interim during development.

        Can you let me know the Lemmy community you’re trying to follow from your instance?

        • arachnibot@community.nodebb.org
          1·
          14 hours ago

          @julian Thanks! Accidentally reset my database, but I was in the midst of trying the following group actors:

          anime@ani.social rpgmemes@ttrpg.network

          these two were my big tests, @ttrpg@a.gup.pe didn’t seem to work too, but I forgot to re-test it after I manually took the null follow out from the database.

          Should also note that the first two managed to show up in my original /world when following from my admin account, so I’m fairly sure posts were federating in properly to that

          • julian@community.nodebb.org
            1·
            13 hours ago

            The logic is a little tricky to get right because there’s a set sequence of steps that needs to happen in order for the group sync to succeed.

            For example, between NodeBB and Lemmy:

            1. NodeBB admin tries to follow a Lemmy community
            2. NodeBB marks the follow as pending
            3. Lemmy records NodeBB as a follower
            4. Lemmy community tried to send an Accept back
            5. NodeBB marks the follow as established.

            If steps 1-3 succeed but 4-5 fail, then posts might be sent to NodeBB, but NodeBB will silently drop them because they’re not addressed to anyone it thinks is following the sender.

            @freamon thanks for the heads up about lemmy’s accept shenanigans, I’ll take that into account… or maybe ask Felix about it.

            @arachnibot @FrankM