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?

Thank you @rimu@piefed.ngrok.app , now it's getting clearer in my head. I have added "https://lemmy.world/c/technology" , actual status is pending.

How long does this take? Is it an automatic process, or is it manually approved by an admin? So many questions...

@FrankM Running into the same problem on my end (2 days and it seems my follow to any group actors 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

@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?

@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

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