full time trainwreck, recreational computer toucher
been on the fedi for a fair bit which is why i'm vaguely leftist and questioning my gender. i blame all of you for this
not the best at social interaction so feel free to bonk if i've done something wrong
best viewed through internet explorer 6 on an MFM compatible instance
avatar description: copper ingot item from minecraft bannya description: a cat sitting in front of a window with bars. looking behind towards the camera clearly wanting to go outside.
If I go to other mastodon servers like mstdn.ca my profile shows basically nothing except some replies despite claiming I have 182 posts. Adding up threads, comments, microblog posts, and replies for my account gives 185 before posting this, so not far off in number.
this is an activitypub thing in general and not specific to kbin. if nobody is following you from that instance your posts won't get sent to that instance (as there's no real point!)
the posts of yours that do get sent there are likely there because you commented on a group that someone had been following.
ps: hey @[email protected], attempting to view a comment on it's remote instance (https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog/t/642285/-/comment/3689397 for example) redirects me to the login page, whereas doing so on the first post on the thread itself works fine.
is this a known issue? it's a bit inconvenient when following kbin content outside kbin (want to make sure i'm not missing any replies and writing the same thing someone already did, which happens fairly often on single user instances such as mine)
@[email protected] I don't know if that's the official word for it but I'm using "backfilling" to refer to loading the history of a person or group after first federating with it.
the outbox is a special collection (list in activitypub speak) that's intended to work kinda like an old school email outbox where you put messages to be delivered and it would deliver them to the inboxes of people (and servers that were offline at that time would later pull them in from the outbox)
or, well, that's what the spec says. nobody uses it like that in reality because activity pub was intended for a completely different kind of social media than how it ended up being used (it seems to expect more "everything apps", including an entire client api that would completely abstract away the instance into nothing more than a dumb pipe for activities unlike the current reality where instance software dictate what you can do)
this probably confused you even more but it's getting pretty late here so I can't words good, sorry!
there actually is a way to "backfill" content, being the outbox. (although it was not meant to be used this way, from what i can see from reading what little documentation is out there)
lemmy uses it to federate about 10 or so (i think it was?) of the latest posts, and most microblog implementations use to federate the "pinned" posts of an account
activitypub has quite a lot of quirks, both spec-wise and implementation wise, and there are many reasons including an apparent near civil war inside the working group which resulted in this messy state it's ended up in
honestly the fact that this protocol works at all is a miracle
