ok so the thing is that rails isn’t just sending Accept: application/activity+json
and your server is returning html for pretty much anything that isn’t exactly that. I’m not sure what part of your stack would be doing that, but the bad behaviour can be seen by giving an accept header the way rails sends it which is:
curl -H 'Accept: application/activity+json, application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", text/html;q=0.1' https://waveform.social/u/megan
(note: you can take text/html out of that altogether and it’ll still return html, just to avoid a red herring there)
You can also see that lemmy.ml does this correctly, if you replace the url above with https://lemmy.ml/u/lemmy
for eg., so it seems that lemmy is capable of doing this correctly and it might be something at your webserver level (but I guess not your cdn if that’s still off?).
Seems to work now, was able to follow @mcc@waveform.social from treehouse :)