wordpress-activitypub: Stuck in "Follow Requested" state
Quick summary
We experienced issues with some Mastodon instances, where the Follow request will not be properly accepted by WordPress. This is no general issue, but seems to be depending on a special kind of setup/setting/hosting. We found out, that it is an issue with quite a lot of instances hosted on Masto.host.
Steps to reproduce
- Go to Mastodon.art
- Follow your blog
- Stuck in pending state
What you expected to happen
Follow should be auto-accepted
What actually happened
Stuck in pending state
Impact
Some (< 50%)
Available workarounds?
No but the platform is still usable
Logs or notes
We assume that this is a race condition, where the Accept of a Follow request will be sent too early.
About this issue
- Original URL
- State: closed
- Created 8 months ago
- Comments: 31 (12 by maintainers)
We seem to have another case here with mstdn.io : https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/fediverse-followers-not-auto-approved-how-to-approve/
Also reported in https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/fediverse-followers-not-auto-approved-how-to-approve/?view=all#post-4001671
Oh, any activity will do that, as long as it comes from the actor with the unavailable inbox URL.
That’s why I chose the account/profile
Updateactivity as a “noop” reset-availability activity, since it really does almost nothing, and yet resets availability.It seems that mastodon wishes to send follows via an
public-api.wordpress.cominbox, which then (at least in our case) returns 401 HTTP errors back, which results in mastodon accumulating errors over days, which then reaches a threshold, after which mastodon will no longer attempt deliveries.This was after manually clearing the “unavailable domain” error from our instance (see https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/27458#issuecomment-1776683194 for more details), but it seems that there’s something wrong with the wordpress public relay, like this.
Why can’t activitypub inboxes be on the domain itself? Why does it need to make a detour? This confuses the federation tab for mastodon immensely, as then the “unavailable domain” is actually another domain than the domain the “user” is on, which prevents mastodon admins from clicking “clear delivery errors” when something like this is going on.
@pfefferle A note: the symptoms of https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/issues/514 were the same. Mastodon shows the request stuck in ‘Follow requested’
518 fixed that for me.
Seeing similar issues trying to follow my own blog from mastodon.ie