My Fediverse follower troubles

On January 11 of 2023 I migrated to a new Fediverse server. It is compatible with Mastodon but the migration of followers broke down completely because… reasons. Nothing is what it appears to be. 😱

Weirdness of following status

Two problems are now going on:

1. People appear to be following me but see none of my posts.
2. People only see "Withdraw follow request" or "Pending" on my profile.

Solution

If you experience this weirdness, you basically have to turn the follow off and on again:

Be aware that from time to time in the future I will have to turn on approval of follow requests. This has to do with being a 1-person instance and especially vulnerable to attacks from people with ill will.

To be clear, this is now my username:

Anyway, it was a bummer to lose so many of my followers but, as they say, it has been a learning experience. Feel free to ask me about it.

Mostly I've understood some Fediverse vulnerabilities. But I'm also reconciling with the consequences of my eagerness to go live with my experiments without enough testing. Alas, there is just no rolling back a migration...

Honestly, social media is unpredictable and fragile. To not miss any future updates from me I would recommend subscribing to my free newsletter.