Thanks for the advice! I checked config.json, the URL matches the one used to access the site...it's very strange. I have to assume that I have something set up wrong in my Caddyfile, as everything else on the site works perfectly.

I can certainly share the URL, though please forgive the roughness of things, this is a development website that has not been advertised to the public yet. It is very rough around the edges!

https://hydrangea.sytes.net

Strange, I have made a forum on my site federated (announcements) and I can see it when I search for it here (announcements@hydrangea.sytes.net under Categories), I can even post to it, but the posts are never received by my site...I will avoid changing anything else on my own for the moment so that I don't make the problem worse

Scratch that, it seems that posts are being delivered to announcements! I just had to enable the permissions for the fediverse on the forum I can now post from here to my site. I still cannot follow users on my site, however, and users on my site cannot follow users from here, so there still seems to be some problems...

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.