I also tried following my username from Mastodon but it was unable to locate it, so I'm afraid that things are still misconfigured in some way! I've seem to be close to things working as expected though, perhaps someone with more experience knows what's going on here?

phoenix can you share a screenshot of the global privileges table?

Specifically the view users privilege should be enabled for fediverse (and probably guests)

I think this is the right place

I am now able to follow users successfully and send them messages! The only thing I can't do at this stage is the reverse, find users from my site here and follow them. Very close though!

This should hopefully be my last update! It seems that federation support is working finally. I was able to follow my Mastodon account and vice versa, chat with it and so forth. I'm guessing the permissions changes and other suggestions that you made were effective, so thanks so much for that! My site is still rough around the edges, but it seems that federation is fully functional

Hmm...at least it seemed to be. I have changed no settings but I am having connectivity issues to Mastodon all of a sudden, my follow requests and messages are no longer getting through...

Back to debugging

phoenix you can always test with ActivityPub.academy, live Mastodon servers can sometimes be delayed.

Ahh, thanks very much for that suggestion Julian it would seem to have been a connectivity issue with Mastodon (a temporary one). The testing with Activitypub.academy was successful and messages even started getting through to Mastodon.social itself again eventually, so I'm guessing it was just a hiccup

Thanks so much!

It seems that mastodon.social is the only federated site that my instance can't connect to reliably, everywhere else (ActivityPub testing site you mentioned for example) is working just fine. I can only assume that there is some problem with connectivity specifically to mastodon.social, but that may not be something that I can do much about

Well, I feel silly...I was trying to send messages to my old Mastodon account for a moment there, when I started sending the messages to my actual Mastodon account, they got through just fine and within seconds.

Sleep is a very important thing for system administrators, I think I need to get more