Re: your edit - please feel free to open an Issue for PieFed about it. It’s MBIN content in Lemmy’s communities, so it’s something that needs attention (we should show it, even if Lemmy doesn’t). I’ll have a crack at fixing it next time I’m working on the code.
Your instance rejects Follow requests from instances not on your ‘Allow list’, which is a pretty small list.
Edit: the list has since been expanded.