Allow to specify preferred feed for POSSE post discovery

[jackysee]

Currently brid.gy will read both the front page's h-entry and <link rel="feed"/> and only read the first 10 permalink for discovery. Apart from the hard limit (#771), I would like to have a more fine-grained control over this discovery mechanism.

My usecase is that the front page is a list of articles, while my other notes / links are on a separate h-feed page. Currently the discovery would always read the list of front page articles first, exhausting the limit and cannot discover the notes/links posts, which are posted more frequently.

Do not have much idea now on how it should be, may be a data attribute like

<link rel="feed" type="text/html" href="..." data-bridgy-discovery-only="true"  />

[snarfed]

thanks for filing!

just to confirm, you only want this because of the limit that bridgy stops after the 10 first entries it sees, right? ie you wouldn't care about it if bridgy didn't have that limit, right?

if that's true, this may be basically the same request as #771. i don't have a full solution yet, but i've added you to the same workaround i mentioned there, so your limit is now 50 entries per crawl. feel free to try adding h-entry back to your front page articles!

[jackysee]

Thank you for raising the limit 😃

I think it's not just about the limit, it's about telling bridgy what's where to discovery the latest change. In my case the article feed is slower than the all-the-thing feed, and is also only a subset of the latter. A way to specify preferred feed would make brid.gy do smarter discovery.

[davidcelis]

@snarfed I think I might have the same request, but please let me know if I'm just setting things up incorrectly, and I'm happy to open a new issue/discussion if any of this ends up being unrelated!

I just spent some time adding basic webmention support to my personal site with the hope of being able to construct and show full conversation trees for my posts. For context, I'm doing some local testing (via ngrok) with a test account, @ewdavidcelis@botsin.space. I replied to one of my own posts to test receiving/parsing/storing the webmention for it, which came through just fine. Then I replied to that reply, but am seeing "No webmention targets" for that. I'm assuming that this means, if I want webmentions for replies that I post within my own threads, I need those replies to appear on my website with syndication links. Is that correct?

Note EDIT: Actually, after running a test against a post in my production website, I do see every response to that post, including a reply from myself both against the original post and then a reply from myself to my own reply, so maybe there was just something weird about that post in my test account?

If so, replying from my own site is the next thing I have planned, with replies to Mastodon posts syndicating to Mastodon itself. It seems like the way I'd prefer to show my replies on my site, though, might lead me to this same problem.

Right now, my website's front page is an h-feed that contains all of my posts, but my plan when adding replies is to separate them similarly to how Twitter and Mastodon do it, by omitting them from my homepage and having a separate page (like https://davidcel.is/posts/with_replies) that shows a complete timeline containing both my original posts and replies. It sounds like, with that route, there's no way to specify that page for Bridgy to crawl, so it won't ever see my syndicated replies and send me webmentions for those.

Relatedly, I think I might not be sure if I'm misreading Bridgy's docs and misunderstanding what I should expect to see webmentions for 😅

If it's a response, did you write the original post yourself? Bridgy doesn't crawl responses to other people's posts, even if they have links to your web site. It only sends back responses to your posts.

Assuming I syndicate my own replies correctly and manage to make Bridgy aware of them, there are two scenarios where I'm not sure if I should expect to receive a webmention or if Bridgy explicitly won't send them:

1. Someone replies to a response on one of my posts. I'm tagged, since I'm the original poster in the conversation, but their reply is directly to someone else's post. Should I expect a webmention for this? Or will one not be sent because the post being responded to technically isn't mine?
2. I reply to somebody else's original Mastodon post from my own website and syndicate it. They, or somebody else, reply to my response. Should I expect a webmention for that? Or will one not be sent because the original post in the conversation isn't mine?

[snarfed]

Hi! No worries, replies inline.

I replied to one of my own posts to test receiving/parsing/storing the webmention for it, which came through just fine. Then I replied to that reply, but am seeing "No webmention targets" for that. I'm assuming that this means, if I want webmentions for replies that I post within my own threads, I need those replies to appear on my website with syndication links. Is that correct?

Either that, or original post links in the replies themselves.

my plan when adding replies is to separate them similarly to how Twitter and Mastodon do it, by omitting them from my homepage and having a separate page (like https://davidcel.is/posts/with_replies) that shows a complete timeline containing both my original posts and replies. It sounds like, with that route, there's no way to specify that page for Bridgy to crawl, so it won't ever see my syndicated replies and send me webmentions for those.

This is definitely doable right now! Just add a <link rel="feed" href="..."> pointing to that separate page to your home page's <head>. Docs: https://brid.gy/about#link

Someone replies to a response on one of my posts. I'm tagged, since I'm the original poster in the conversation, but their reply is directly to someone else's post. Should I expect a webmention for this? Or will one not be sent because the post being responded to technically isn't mine?

Bridgy sends webmention for entire reply trees under your own original posts, so you should get a webmention for this.

I reply to somebody else's original Mastodon post from my own website and syndicate it. They, or somebody else, reply to my response. Should I expect a webmention for that? Or will one not be sent because the original post in the conversation isn't mine?

I believe you will, but I can't give quite as strong a guarantee, since I haven't mapped out exactly how ActivityPub inbox delivery works in this case. If you do, it'll only be for replies that get delivered to your home instance.

[davidcelis]

Thanks, appreciate your answers! I wasn't sure whether or not that rel="feed" link would be crawled separately from my homepage or in addition to my homepage, but it sounds like that link is what I'll want to add once I get replies in place