And, the final note for today, this is not the best way to follow people on federated pump.io systems, and it appears to have worked:

"""
In [100]: a = pump.Person('Tsyesika@io.theperplexingpariah.co.uk')
In [101]: a.follow()
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
SSLError
...
In [102]: a.follow()
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ConnectionError

In [103]: a.follow()
"""