PieFed help

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It's seems right that we should have a local community to help us all with PieFed

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Comments before subscribing not fetch (piefed.marud.fr)

submitted 1 week ago by marud@piefed.marud.fr to c/piefed_help@piefed.social

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Hello there,

I've installed piefed with docker compose and everything seems to be going great, but only for 1 thing : the comments don't get fetch before the time I add the community.

Here I just joined !piefed_help@piefed.social and I can see every topic, but they are all with 0 comment and the same score.

I thought it was a question of time before federation does the work, but it's been a week now and it's the same.
Everything made AFTER joining is ok, though, and I can see comments.

I didn't found a note or a ticket for that, but do someone has this issue ?

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[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

AFAIK that's just the default way that federation works on the fediverse. Subscribing to communities is not retroactive, it will pull over a handful of posts sometimes but basically you only start copying the content fully from the moment that the first user of your instance subscribed. Same way with Lemmy instances.

It does make sense because it would rapidly increase the resources required to host a server if it was mirroring that much more content with every subscribe.

I'm not sure if there is a way to add this functionality, but it would be really beneficial to have a toggle that allows a server admin to enable retroactive subscription in certain cases. It might require some technical improvements but it seems like a key feature.

[–] marud@piefed.marud.fr 4 points 1 week ago

Oh, so I was maybe mistaken as I thought that the behaviour was different on Lemmy.

The fact that I see old posts but not old comments made me think that something was wrong

[–] Tournesol@feddit.fr 3 points 1 week ago

Yeah, have the same problem on bare metal install, I don't think there's a refetcher atm ?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah it's not ideal. The community outbox only has posts in it so that's all that PieFed can retrieve. If PieFed used the outbox to get the posts and then used the Lemmy API to get the comments too then we could retrieve a more fulsome history. But then we're using the Lemmy API and not ActivityPub, which is standardized.

Lemmy could include a replies collection on posts, over ActivityPub. But the devs chose not to. Maybe for performance reasons, I guess.

The problem quickly becomes unimportant as new content starts to arrive.

[–] marud@piefed.marud.fr 1 points 1 week ago

The fact it's ideal or not is not really important, what is important is that Lemmy chose to not get behind AP to do this, and that the behaviour we're facing is intended (maybe that should be written somewhere so it could be crystal clear when installing ?).

So that's not a bug, that's a potential technical debt you chose to not have the burden of because you'll have to adapt this every time Lemmy would update their APIs.

The only thing I could think of is the fact that content is "lost" for piefed users, as the comment history is not available on their side.

But thank you very much for explaining the reasons