I’ve a fresh install of Write Freely on Debian. Everything seems to work fine in terms of posting/reading/editing etc. It’s served by Apache with SSL. DNS is handled by Cloudflare and I’ve tried what follows with or without their proxying. Federation is turned on and I should be able to connect via @david@beemusings.theapiarist.org.
From Mastodon I can search for my federated name and it pulls up the profile. If I ‘follow’, Mastodon tells me the follower count reaches 1. However, nothing appears in the Write Freely --debug output, and reloading the Mastodon page resets the follower count to 0.
I found this from @matt about resetting Mastodon instance admin panel but it’s not something I have access to. However, I have also tried from a separate Mastodon instance with a new/different username and it all behaves the same (view the profile, see there are posts but only one is listed, and others are not accessible).
Finally, I’ve had this error pop up at least once in the logs while trying to get this to work, though not sure it was from a request I made as the WF server is visited periodically by others.
ERROR: 2024/11/26 21:29:35 collections.go:273: [PROGRAMMER ERROR] WARNING: Collection.hostName is empty! Federation and many other things will fail! If you’re seeing this in the wild, please report this bug and let us know what you were doing just before this: Sign in to GitHub · GitHub
A quick search back through the logs shows that this pops up quite frequently … every time I access the Customize menu.
However, searching for my WF federated name turns up old WF sub-headings. I’ve changed these a couple of times and it looks like the fediverse has these old versions cached somewhere. mastodon.scot and mastodon.social even have different versions of this sub-heading. This was accessing the site from a new browser via TOR, so should not be a browser cache issue.
Hmm, looking at your WF instance, all the standard endpoints seem to be showing up fine. I’m also able to follow your blog from our writing.exchange instance and it seems to stick (maybe you could confirm you see me on your Subscribers list?).
Do you mean on the blog profile, as it shows up in Mastodon? Right now, this information is cached on your local Mastodon instance and isn’t updated when you change it in WF, which is why you’re seeing different versions on different Masto instances.
Are you still unable to follow (and have it stick after refreshing) across both instances you’re testing from?
Thanks @matt … good to know that it looks OK from the outside. Since posting the original Q I’d tried about a dozen times to follow from my normal Mastodon instance, and from another I joined just in case there was something weird about my usual host. Nothing worked.
However, I can see you as a follower under Stats
Since you confirmed it worked from your instance, I wiped all the old ‘test’ posts, wrote a welcome post, refollowed from mine (mastodon.scot) and I can now see that as well . I made no changes at this end … it just worked. Odd. From Mastodon, it also ‘sticks’ and appears in my list of follows.
I didn’t know Mastodon caches profile information - very useful.
I’ve yet to see my ‘test’ Mastodon account (on mastodon.social) appear as a follower, but only connected that in the last 30 minutes or so.
So, thanks again, though I’m really not sure what changed, but am chuffed it now seems to work. I celebrated by buying the iOS app
Yep, and it can sometimes cause issue if you’re changing around usernames, server configuration, etc. – so this could’ve potentially been the issue, too.
Great way to celebrate! Thanks for buying it! And glad it’s all working.
. I made no changes at this end … it just worked. Odd. From Mastodon, it also ‘sticks’ and appears in my list of follows.
Thanks for buying it! And glad it’s all working.