So, I run my own instance (dandroid.app), and as of about 10 days ago, all outgoing federation stopped working. Incoming federation still seems to work fine. I'm not sure exactly what changed. It was around the time that I set up pihole on my network, but I have since shut down pihole and federation has not resumed. I have tried restarting all the services with docker-compose down and then up. I also tried restarting my server completely.
What debugging steps can I take to figure out where the failure is occuring?
Try select * from instance where domain = 'popular.instance'; and see the last time it was updated via the updated column. I've been having to update that column with update instance set updated = now(); because once that timestamp becomes older than 3 days your instance assumes it's "dead".
I checked a few instances and they were all last updated on November 18th. I ran that query and updated the updated field to now for all rows, but they aren't continuing to update after that, and no traffic is coming through.