So I know that there are some limitations for federation, especially if you are on a smaller instance. On Mastodon I stumble upon this problem on a daily basis. Here is an example. My account is on a smaller local instance (social.cologne) and in the following picture is a post of Eugen Rochko (which I follow):
As you can see there appears to be 0 likes and 0 boosts, below are 2 conmments (not pictured). As far as I understand this is a result of federation. My instance only tracks likes and boost of my instance (and people who are followed on my instance) and as a result his post seems to be not popular at all.
Too see every interaction I would have to visit the original post on Eugens instance (https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/112574727273953783). Currently there are 6 boosts and 64 favorites on this post, with 4 replies below.
Last year I stumbled upon an android app that is able to show me the full interactions without visiting the source instance manually (https://github.com/tooot-app).
This is how I see Eugens post in my timeline
(Same as official app) and when i click on it to see the replies, the full content is shown.
I’m assuming that the app is loading the full content manually - just like if you would open the source instance.
Shouldn’t this behaviour be the default - even in the main mastodon app? If I where to only use the official app I would miss most of the interactions and content (from people my instance doesnt know about). There are other examples where you would see replies to posts that allegedly don’t exists. Only with Tooot I can see the rest of the conversation.
The tooot app didn’t see any updates for some time… Are there any other apps that show full interactions right away as well?
According to Gargron that is the expected behaviour.
In the git page there are countless PRs to solve this, but he refuses. For him it will make mastodon hurt people feelings.
FWIW, all server-based software works like that. Lemmy, Pixelfed, Pleroma…
What we need is more clients implementing the C2S spec, but I will refrain from getting into another tirade about this.
Not really. My Akkoma instance AFAIK does exactly what OP describes via the server.
You could try: https://phanpy.social/
That is a nice UI but still has the same problems as the official app. It doesn’t show all the interactions.
Ah, I thought it maybe does since when I use that with my Akkoma instance I (mostly) don’t have that problem. You can pretty easily migrate you account from Mastodon to Akkoma, so maybe that is an option? I hear that such issues are mostly exclusive to Mastodon.
If you don’t have that problem, it is either because your instance is well connected and/or using some relay.
Could you expand on the relay thing? How does one know if a server uses a relay?
If you are the admin of the instance, you can it set up.
What about the user side? If I want to pick an instance that uses a relay, is there a way to know?
There is no way to know without access to the admin dashboard. You can get an idea of how active an instance is by checking the federated timeline stream, though.
Neither, its pretty much a single user instance without a relay.
But you are right that the problem is not completely non-existant, but Akkoma does actively pull in more replies etc. than Mastodon seems to do.
most apps that show “real” statistics fetch them directly from remote instance. while mastodon approach may not be too user friendly, if mastodon.social fetched remotely every post viewed by its users it would load a lot smaller instances with needless traffic.
its also not very private: you are directly connecting to each remote instance, do you trust them all? mastodon make you only ever connect to your instance, which you should trust.
lemmy servers broadcast activities across them, replicating counters. while this makes remote upvotes/downvotes show, it means federating with lemmy is pretty painful as it broadcasts a TON of activities. to provide some numbers, i started federating with 2/3 lemmy instances around half a week ago and in just that time i gathered ~100k likes (~17M) while full objects sit at ~10k (~12M)
i think a middle ground approach that may work would be to share these counters directly on the owning instance, so that fetching servers can get the current count upon fetching and only update infrequently. it doesnt even need an AP extention: by embedding the “likes” and “shares” collections there’s a “total_items” field which can be the likes count for an object. you can check, for example, this object on my instance (remove
/webfrom url to view bare json): its like count is visible directly, no need to relay each likealso another app that directly fetches statistics is fedilab
Can you clarify this? As a normal user with one of the standard clients, who is on one random instance and follows people on other instances, we are missing Likes and Boost? I can live this, it’s just a number. But, are we also missing replies? I don’t expect OP to retoot all replies, but I do want to read them? At least i want the option the read them.
Yes, you will miss replies. This is the nature of federation as it is now.
So what is needed to a reply?
If I follow the replies’ author, I will get it. Right?
If someone in my instance follows the author, will I also see it?
If someone boosts the reply?
So weird that is not the default behavior.
Know an iOS client which implements this?
According to this post Mammoth.
https://twit.social/@mbwelch/110268426561442301
I haven’t tried it though.
I can only assume that the issue is that they’re trying to reduce the number of calls to the original instance. If you’re just scrolling by, you only see the post that’s cached on your own server, and it doesn’t communicate with the original instance until you open the post. Making it so that every time some scrolls by a post it contacts the original instance sounds like it massively increases the amount of traffic to the original instance which goes against the idea of software that supports smaller, self or community hosted servers.
