Cannot follow my new account from Mastodon

[xaviershay]

I'm seeing the exact same issue as #1928 using https://mas.to (of which I am just a user, not an admin), but I suspect might be a different cause.

Describe the bug

Following my account with my mas.to account leads to a pending approval request. My account is not set to moderate follow requests, nor do I see any request in my account profile.

To Reproduce

• Try to follow @[email protected] from mas.to

Expected behavior

Account is followed with no pending approval.

Instance

bookwork.social

Additional context

• Following @[email protected] works as expected.
• My eyes don't detect any significant differences between my JSON and followTest.

Sorry I'm too new to this whole thing to know how debug more effectively, but am happy to chase down leads. I don't really need this feature, I was mostly curious whether it would be a good option for publishing a feed to mastodon.

Thanks for all your work 🙏

[weijia-cheng]

I am also having this problem trying to follow @[email protected] from @[email protected]. Same issue with the pending approval request.

[weijia-cheng]

What I see right after I click "follow" from deacon.social:

What happens shortly after I refresh the page:

[xaviershay]

Confirming that those screenshots match my experience, and I get the same behaviour attempting to follow @[email protected].

[marcusyoung]

In my experience this will resolve itself in a day or two. It appears to be caused by a backlog of tasks on the bookwyrm.social instance.

[weijia-cheng]

@marcusyoung You're right, it did resolve itself a little afterwards.

[fasiha]

Hmm, the issue hasn’t resolved for me for several weeks, but will try to toggle “withdraw” and “follow” again now and check in a couple of days.

[quisquous]

Hmm, the issue hasn’t resolved for me for several weeks, but will try to toggle “withdraw” and “follow” again now and check in a couple of days.

Depending on your instance, it could also be #1179.

[asmaloney]

Just a "me too" - I'm trying to follow from fosstodon.org.

How do I know if they have "secure mode" on?

[marcusyoung]

Allow up to 48 hours for this to take effect if you are on bookwyrm.social. This is caused by a backlog of background tasks due to the number of users on that instance.

[asmaloney]

OK thank you. Is the scaling problem being tracked somewhere? It's a logical "first thing" to do, so it's a little confusing and detracts from the UX.

[marcusyoung]

I don't know if it's a scaling problem or just inadequate resource. I don't know what spec bookwyrm.social is running.

[hughrun]

bookwyrm.social has had some issues with Celery (task manager) falling over in recent times, which can cause delays like this. There is a fix coming soon to deal with AUTHORIZED_FETCH (secure mode) Mastodon servers.

[mouse-reeve]

For bookwyrm.social users, this should now be taking a couple minutes tops, rather than days or hours. If you have a pending follow request, try cancelling a pending follow request and re-following the user. Please let me know if the follow doesn't go through within maybe 5 minutes.

I think it may be possible to have some of these transactions happen synchronously when there aren't external requests that need to be made (ie, if the remote user in the relationship is already known to the local server), which would be a big improvement as well.

[mouse-reeve]

I'm going to close this on the assumption that follow requests are no longer problematic. Please open a new issue if they are, because it's probably a new problem. I extremely appreciate you all bearing with me on this one!