find original post links across all previous posts in a reply chain, not just the first

[snarfed]

right now, we're designed entirely for the post-and-comments model. we find the original post for a silo post, then send all responses to it.

however, comments themselves can have original posts. in practice, this happens most often on twitter, since replies (comments) are themselves full fledged tweets.

here's an example. @kartikprabhu's first two tweets in the chain both have original posts; the second with a link, the first with a rel-syndication link here.

right now, when there are multiple candidates like this, each response ends up attached to a single candidate, arbitrarily. we should ideally attach it to the original tweet and the tweet it's directly replying to, or maybe all possible candidates. not sure which.

for facebook, G+, and instagram, we don't perform original post discovery on comments at all, so responses always get sent to the original post. we could theoretically do the same thing for them too.

[snarfed]

@kartikprabhu, just fyi, i doubt i'll prioritize this in the near future. it'll take a bit of thought and work, but it's definitely doable. feel free to take a stab at it if you want!

[snarfed]

this actually also sometimes breaks twitter reply chains so that they stop getting sent at all. it happened to @lostfocus in this conversation. the first couple replies worked, but then @pfefferle's second reply got attached to dominik's first reply as its activity, instead of his original tweet, so it didn't get any original post links.

it looks like an easy heuristic fix for just this bug (ie not the full feature request) might be to attach the response to the earliest activity we can find, ie the one with the lowest id, and not the first one we see.

the full fix might not be too much more work though...

[snarfed]

@kartikprabhu, the new behavior for tweet reply chains is, for a given response, you'll get a webmention for each tweet (post) of yours that's a direct ancestor in the chain. (sorry, i know you wanted it to just go to the most recent one. i'm going with this instead for now, but i might reconsider in the future. we'll see!)

[kartikprabhu]

The more I have thought about this, the more complicated it seems. I'll play around with this privately once I get activity-streams working on my own. I'll let you know of any (unlikely) bright ideas I stumble upon.

[snarfed]

reopening because the mf2 handlers don't get this quite right. handler (ie webmention source) urls all need a single root activity id. we currently just use the first, and then only include its original post url(s).

here's an example. jesse's reply tweet was sent both there and to the full chain, but its mf2 handler only links to the "committed fix" tweet, not the earlier one. propagate log here.

possible fix is to use Response.activities_json to populate original post links in handlers instead of the APIs. i guess that's #15, at least in part?

[snarfed]

so...this is hard. :confounded:

[kartikprabhu]

yeah... I have been thinking of how to do this too but no ideas... I propose that bridgy go back to doing the simplest possible thing and leave the complexities to the webmention handlers.

[snarfed]

i actually see how i want to do it on the bridgy side now. it's definitely doable. and hopefully the new behavior should be harmless for webmention recipients, right? i don't think anyone's actually trying to do the single unified thread yet, so this should still work ok for everyone without any new de-duping or other logic.

[snarfed]

b75a01dd9fcd1f950e52e691ab2a5f36ee882575

[snarfed]

confirmed kill! here's the test twitter thread. the "baz!" reply got sent to both the first post and the second post. here's the log.

closing (again) as fixed. phew. i need a :beer:.