Does anyone know if mastodon broadcasts replies to posts?
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Does anyone know if mastodon broadcasts replies to posts?
I (possibly naively) assumed I'd catch an ActivityPub `Create` event on my server when someone replied to a post created on my server, but nothing's arriving š¤·
How are people learning about replies to their posts? What am I doing wrong?
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Does anyone know if mastodon broadcasts replies to posts?
I (possibly naively) assumed I'd catch an ActivityPub `Create` event on my server when someone replied to a post created on my server, but nothing's arriving š¤·
How are people learning about replies to their posts? What am I doing wrong?
@paulgc@mastodon.social nope! Replies are only received by your server if they're sent them by the person replying.
On Mastodon this usually takes the form of a mention. When a user is mentioned on Mastodon, they are de facto addressed as well.
In turn, that means the activity is delivered to those addressed users.
If a mastodon user replies to your post but does not mention you, then you will not be receiving that reply. (I think.)
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@paulgc@mastodon.social realistically, however, most software is incentivized to actually address replies to the person they are replying to. Otherwise, they wouldn't get it and there wouldn't be any point to replying, right? š
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@julian wow, ok. That's really helpful - thanks!
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@julian@activitypub.space Replying now because I only saw this thread today (h/t @reiver), but I don't think this is quite accurate as written regarding Mastodon.
AIUI, Mastodon decouples replying and notifying. If you reply to a post from a Mastodon server but do not tag the author of the parent post, they will be part of the ActivityPub recipient list (and their server will receive the reply), but if the parent poster is also on a Mastodon server, they will not receive a notification about the reply.
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@julian@activitypub.space Replying now because I only saw this thread today (h/t @reiver), but I don't think this is quite accurate as written regarding Mastodon.
AIUI, Mastodon decouples replying and notifying. If you reply to a post from a Mastodon server but do not tag the author of the parent post, they will be part of the ActivityPub recipient list (and their server will receive the reply), but if the parent poster is also on a Mastodon server, they will not receive a notification about the reply.
In other words, @paulgc, you should be seeing those Create activities if the reply comes from Mastodon. I think if you reply to a post on your server from https://activitypub.academy you can inspect the payload that gets sent.
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In other words, @paulgc, you should be seeing those Create activities if the reply comes from Mastodon. I think if you reply to a post on your server from https://activitypub.academy you can inspect the payload that gets sent.
@julian@fietkau.social @julian@activitypub.space @reiver Thanks - you're right, I am now seeing them. They turned up at the shared inbox, rather than the user's inbox, which is why I was missing them to start with. activitypub.academy looks useful!
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@julian@fietkau.social @julian@activitypub.space @reiver Thanks - you're right, I am now seeing them. They turned up at the shared inbox, rather than the user's inbox, which is why I was missing them to start with. activitypub.academy looks useful!
@paulgc@mastodon.social yes, shared inbox is useful to reduce the number of requests sent.
NodeBB will always use a shared inbox if one can be found for the user.
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@julian@fietkau.social @julian@activitypub.space @reiver Thanks - you're right, I am now seeing them. They turned up at the shared inbox, rather than the user's inbox, which is why I was missing them to start with. activitypub.academy looks useful!
@paulgc Glad it's working! Although now that I've tested it myself, I'm not quite as confident anymore. š¤ A test reply I made at https://activitypub.academy/@begusla_laddaciul/115865414668779913 has the ActivityPub `to` set as the account's followers and `cc` to as.Public, but was sent to my server anyway. So I guess the behavior, at least on activitypub.academy, is to not individually address the parent poster, but send them a copy of the post anyway (presumably justified by W3C ActivityPub Ā§7.1.3). Feels a bit funky.
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@paulgc Glad it's working! Although now that I've tested it myself, I'm not quite as confident anymore. š¤ A test reply I made at https://activitypub.academy/@begusla_laddaciul/115865414668779913 has the ActivityPub `to` set as the account's followers and `cc` to as.Public, but was sent to my server anyway. So I guess the behavior, at least on activitypub.academy, is to not individually address the parent poster, but send them a copy of the post anyway (presumably justified by W3C ActivityPub Ā§7.1.3). Feels a bit funky.
@julian@fietkau.social @paulgc@mastodon.social mm, I don't suppose there's any reason addressees and delivery recipients need align.
You can't enforce it š
NodeBB does this too, where we'll send a copy of a reply to everybody in the immediate chain, even if they're not mentioned.
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@julian@activitypub.space @paulgc I'm lucky none of my projects so far have needed to really deal with replies, so I haven't had to think about this. š
But it reminds me how I've been told that Misskey sends an account's likes to its followers in addition to the author of the liked post, which Mastodon does not. So on Misskey, if a post comes by your feed that someone you follow has previously liked, you see that information. That's cool in some ways and showcases implementation differences in activity delivery.
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@julian@activitypub.space @paulgc I'm lucky none of my projects so far have needed to really deal with replies, so I haven't had to think about this. š
But it reminds me how I've been told that Misskey sends an account's likes to its followers in addition to the author of the liked post, which Mastodon does not. So on Misskey, if a post comes by your feed that someone you follow has previously liked, you see that information. That's cool in some ways and showcases implementation differences in activity delivery.
@julian@fietkau.social that's a great idea! I should adopt that, there's no downside.
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@julian@activitypub.space @julian@fietkau.social well, in theory, you can have private likes and public likes. misskey and pleroma do public likes. mastodon does private likes, but then shows them publicly if anyone asks the origin site. because addressing is just a suggestion, apparently ;)
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@reiver i think the disjunction between Object and Link was actually unnecessary. https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/issues/666
i also think there's too much emphasis on types when there really shouldn't be -- it's the *properties* that you end up using almost all of the time. pretty much the only types that actually matter are the Activity types (because you can't infer those).
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@reiver Did you and I discuss queryfy a while ago, or was it one of my other projects?
Just wondering whether I owe you a heads up since queryfy has been bumped up to v0.3.0
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With ActivityPub / ActivityStreams...
To me, it feels like there should have been something that is a common parent of both 'Object' and 'Link'.
That just had the "name", "nameMap", and "preview" fields (along with "id" and "type, of course) ā since that is what 'Object' and 'Link' share in common.
I'll just call this common parent: 'Entity'.
...
It could have even been an opportunity to talk about how to handle unknown types.
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@soapdog@toot.cafe hmm... just thinking aloud here.
You posit in another post that the network effects inflate exponentially:
> Push models are resource hogs that approach exponential growth in a large network like the fediverse
That's not true. If you post a message then it sends a copy to each follower. That's linear growth. If you collapse recipients via shared inboxes you can reduce that further.
If you're referring to the torrent of requests that happen if your post is shared (the "thundering herd" problem) then that's actually a PULL happening from those requesting instances!
Secondly, in a pull model of AP, you would need to continually poll servers of all your followers so as to approach a real-time effect. You'd be polling servers over and over again, and many of them would have nothing new, with so much wasted traffic.
If your expectations include semi real-time updates, the push model is much more performant, in my humble opinion.
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@evan @mariusor @silverpill i think we probably need to revisit the user story of creating multiple objects at once, or more accurately, the user story of minting and binding multiple identifiers at once.
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@evan my suggestion: https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/533
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@evan @mariusor @silverpill re: ids though the RDF ecosystem (and jsonld) doesn't use "null", it uses blank node identifiers (those prefixed with _: are special cased by the prefix expansion algorithm). this can allow for "transient" activities or "anonymous" objects (and the graph data model auto assigns _:b1, _:b2 and so on when "id" is missing; the canonicalization algorithm assigns _:c14n0 and _:c14n1 and so on)
this is maybe not the best way to create replies collections though...
