Do you mean that you try to follow but the status stays pending?
That’s right
By default Mastodon does not load all the posts in the outbox, it will only load those the instance has already received
I’m quite aware of that. In any case my instance cannot communicate with my blog, and so far the only thing that separates people who can communicate from those who can’t is whether or not secure mode is enabled. This is also the case for pleroma instances in its equivalent of secure mode as well.