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Comment by patchtopic | Hacker News Reader

I was just trying to "follow" from a mastodon instance and nothing seems to happen.. though I'm not exactly sure what should happen.

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When you follow a user on Mastodon there's no feedback; there is the other way around.

Do you see their posts in your feed?

There's definitely some weirdness with the @t@hexa.ninja account given as an example of an instance in the wild.

Loading that in Mastodon's "Web" says it contains "4 posts", but consulting the "Posts and replies" tab will reveal the contents of 5 posts. Meanwhile, this number is about half of the expected number, based on the posts that are actually visible on the <https://hexa.ninja/> landing page (i.e. as viewed in e.g. Firefox).

ActivityPub does not handle old posts. This post number is the number of posts since at least one person on that instance followed them. Before that, the instance didn't know they existed

ActivityPub is a publisher/subscriber protocol

> ActivityPub does not handle old posts.

That is incorrect. Mastodon is the one doesn't handle old posts[1], because they insist on presenting to the user only what has already been federated with it. See [2] for a more in-depth explanation.

If they would use the protocol as intended, and actually perform requests on the remote Outbox collection when the user wants to view the posts of a remote actor, there would be no issue.

[1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017

[2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017#issuecomme...

> does not handle old posts. This post number is the number of posts since at least one person on that instance followed them.

That's not an explanation for the behavior here.

The instance's very first Hello World post <https://hexa.ninja/o/4473c26694414f928466337c1a9e0fc6> appears, while more recent ones don't. There's probably no one actually following this account from this instance. (Hard to check.)

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