@worldsendless Above should work for you. But if you really insist on remote following, you might try waiting 48-72 hours and the issue might automatically fix:
https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/issues-with-remote-follows-solved-solved-more-by-accident-than-design/1398/9

@adnan360 huh. That worked with no trouble. Thanks! For some reason clicking his name and following it to his Mastodon instance, types.pl, failed as my pictures showed. But simply searching and pressing "follow" worked without a hitch

@worldsendless Hm. Seems like you were taken to remote follow option for some reason.

@adnan360 Why are those different things?

@worldsendless Good question. I think it's because instances are usually different sites. You are logged into your own Masto instance, but not on the other user's instance. Remote follow is a way to connect between them.

But with the search trick it loads it into the currently logged in UI so it doesn't have to use the remote follow mechanism.

This even works on other activitypub clients like hubzilla. It's a good way to follow people on activitypub.

@worldsendless

Did your remote follow request actually get accepted and go through. If you go to the profile now does it say you are following them?

My guess is that the server has us blocked. From what I can tell from the moderators page they block VERY heavily including mastodon.online and fosstodon and other generally well behaved instances have gotten the block hammer from them.

@adnan360

@freemo @adnan360 Now that I check, it says "awaiting approval." So I don't know what that says about whether it's working.

@worldsendless

I suspect the server may have us blocked, hard to say for sure.

@adnan360

@freemo @worldsendless I think this is how he configured his account.
ref: https://github.com/felx/mastodon-documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/User-guide.md

It showed awaiting for me too. Just checked now and I can see that the button is showing "Unfollow" so it means he accepted my request.

So I guess problem solved.