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Certain posts from external instances aren't displayed #4

Closed ForNeVeR closed 1 year ago

ForNeVeR commented 1 year ago

I am still new to Mastodon, so please forgive me if I misunderstand something.

I am following this guy, @Minoru: https://functional.cafe/@minoru

You can see that he has plenty of posts visible on his native Mastodon instance.

But when I visit https://dotnet.social/@minoru@functional.cafe, then there's almost nothing, one post from 12'th of Dec and that's it.

What's the reason for this?

tbolon commented 1 year ago

Do you have an account on dotnet.social where you follow this account? Because unless someone on the server subscribed to his account, messages are not forwarded to the instance.

tbolon commented 1 year ago

When I click on the followers link on his profile on dotnet.social it seems that no one is following him from dotnet.social: https://dotnet.social/@minoru@functional.cafe/followers

Can you give me a link to your account?

ForNeVeR commented 1 year ago

Sure thing, I'm sorry I didn't provide the link in the first place. My account is https://dotnet.social/@fornever

ForNeVeR commented 1 year ago

Interestingly, the said followers page is empty for me, even though it should mention myself:

image
tbolon commented 1 year ago

That's what I find strange... Could you try to unfollow and follow back?

tbolon commented 1 year ago

I tried following him...

ForNeVeR commented 1 year ago

Unfollow, refresh the page.

image

Follow, refresh the page:

image

…and now it seems I can see a bit more posts: the mentioned from 12th of Dec, and more of older ones.

No new posts still :(

Maybe I have to wait a bit for the sync to kick in?

ForNeVeR commented 1 year ago

I tried following him, I also found this: https://functional.cafe/@minoru/106354715543724537

Sure, I've seen that. But if there are some sync issues for bigger posts, then I assume either nothing would be synced, or some longer posts would be lost.

In this case, though, the only fresh post I see is the one from 12th of Dec, and nothing else, even smaller posts aren't visible.

Say, this one is pretty small: https://functional.cafe/@minoru/109547903827029507

tbolon commented 1 year ago

Yes, I edited my comment after I seen that there are recent short posts.

I will check tomorrow, it seems I have a backend log with the status of the synchronization for the server and/or account.

tbolon commented 1 year ago

https://functional.cafe/@minoru/followers strange thing also is that the followers list is also empty when I browse his profile on functional.cafe server...

SparkDustJoe commented 1 year ago

Is this type of syncing causing our disk usage to surge? I know I started following a lot of chatty people that I was previously in Birdland.

tbolon commented 1 year ago

@SparkDustJoe I don't think there is a surge in disk usage. The growth is constant since we started the server one month ago, and the external activity only cause a temporary increase in disk usage, since all cached medias are removed after 7 days.

I tried comparing with another profile from functional.cafe:

I don't see any posts missing (the followers/following list is still hidden, or missing in our local profile).

Minoru commented 1 year ago

You can see that he has plenty of posts visible on his native Mastodon instance. But when I visit https://dotnet.social/@minoru@functional.cafe, then there's almost nothing, one post from 12'th of Dec and that's it.

@tbolon already told you that in https://github.com/dotnet-social/community/issues/4#issuecomment-1362068803, but I'm gonna expand it a bit.

This is normal. When you open a user's profile in your instance's UI (or your mobile app), an HTTP request is made to fetch info about their profile (try curl -H 'Accept: application/activity+json' https://functional.cafe/users/minoru). This info contains stuff like display name, avatar, and bio, but does not include recent posts.

Sometimes that'd be the end of it, and you'd see something like this: Screenshot 2022-12-23 at 21-49-06 Functional Café

Other times your instance will still display some posts. This happens because these posts reached the instance some other way, e.g. because someone from your instance is/was subscribed to that user, or because someone from your instance is/was subscribed to someone who boosted that post.

This behaviour is a long-standing issue in Mastodon: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34 To my knowledge, other Fediverse software (e.g. Pleroma) has the same limitations.

https://functional.cafe/@minoru/followers strange thing also is that the followers list is also empty when I browse his profile on functional.cafe server...

I have "Hide your social graph" enabled (Mastodon UI: App Settings → User Preferences → Profile). This is orthogonal to hiding follower count which was mentioned here, and which I do not have enabled.

ForNeVeR commented 1 year ago

Thanks for your clarification, everyone!

I can conclude the following.

  1. The posts only started being auto-imported after someone from the server started following the account in question, that's a major downside, but it looks like a design problem of Mastodon. Maybe it will be resolved one day; anyway, we can't do anything about it right now.
  2. The followers being inaccessible is not a bug, but a feature of that instance.

Also, it looks like I can see newer posts from @Minoru, so it really works as described.

Case closed, I am sorry for wasting everyone's time on this.