Unable to follow blog [SOLVED]

Any other issues you’ve run into?

  1. i can’t follow my blog. followers are locked.

i’m not sure if this is a new feature since 0.9 or something broke on my blog.

  1. also it seems tags are not federating anymore. i can’t find my blogs posts with #bookReview tag.

the last post that shows up when i search #bookReview is from March 19th.

NOTE: I wish we could import our posts into a new blog. then i would probably just reinstall my blog and import posts again, and it’d probably work again but i guess I wouldn’t learn more computer skills that way though :smiley:

It looks like there’s a trailing slash in your URLs, which could cause Mastodon to reject some requests. Maybe try removing it from the host value in your config file, then re-follow your account and see if that works. This should fix both issues :slight_smile:

ok great.

so i changed
/var/www/writefreely/config.ini from https://blog.arkadi.one/ to https://blog.arkadi.one

now it shows me following the blog, but still doesn’t show up in my Home timeline. hmm, strange.

searching for tags on the test post i made DOES work though. so maybe it is working.

:smiley:

Hmm, did you re-follow the blog before making the test post? Because otherwise the post won’t show up in your feed.

-unfollowed, refollowed blog
-posted again

NOW it works. strange.

thank you

[SOLVED]

Great! Yeah, this is just how ActivityPub works – a user needs to follow a blog first, so our systems know where to send posts out to. Glad it’s working now!

Hello there ! I up this post because I have a question related to this last answer you posted : when I follow a blog, or even when I watch a new blog in mastodon, I see the account has 2 toots for example, but the toots doesn’t appear. So, the history of the account show less toots than it actually has, and that means it’s impossible to reply or react to posts that have been posted before I followed the blog, even if I discovered them in the reader section of writefreely.

Is it a normal behaviour ?

Hi @mathieunicolas! You’re right, that’s normal behaviour — a quirk of how ActivityPub works as @danielbowen mentioned.

Hi, thanks for you answer @cjeller1592 ! After few research, It looks like ActivityPub allows people who don’t follow an actor to be able to see the history of the publications, because it’s implemented this way in peertube for example : if I search for a peertube channel, I can see all its videos even if I’m not following him.

Yep, in your particular case, this is a actually quirk of Mastodon, not ActivityPub. Mastodon doesn’t pull in old posts once you follow an actor, as Peertube might do (see issue #34), but it does display the count of total posts, which happens separately from the posts themselves.

To find those old posts you mention, the workaround is simple: search for the full URL of the post in Mastodon. That will retrieve it and let you interact with it.

Thanks for you answer @matt, this is where I don’t understand things anymore : if a search for a peertube channel in mastodon I can see the previous publications, even when I’m not a follower, and even if I don’t subscribe.

Do you find any logic in this situation ? I don’t, but I don’t know how AP can be implemented so maybe I miss something !

In ActivityPub, when actor Alice follows actor Bob, it tells Bob to always send new messages to Alice from that point forward. That’s why previous messages don’t show up for Alice before she follows Bob – he doesn’t know that Alice wants to receive his messages. (It’s like email.)

However, totally separate from the ActivityPub protocol, when Alice searches for a message from Bob, she can still find it by its URL. But it doesn’t mean Bob will start delivering new messages to her. Mastodon only retrieves that single post. Does that make sense?

Hey, thanks for your reply ! That makes perfect sense, and what I don’t understand is why there’s 2 different behaviours : why if I display Bob’s Writefreely account I see the count of toots without the toots, and if I display Bob’s peertube account I see count of toots, and the toots.

Here, 2 screenshots from my mastodon client, @actu@blog.alloe.fr is a write.as blog and @astronogeek@alttube.fr is a peertube channel.

The Peertube channel is likely showing up in its full form because someone else on your Mastodon instance is following the account.

That’s another aspect to this that I left out: if another actor on Alice’s Mastodon instance, Charlie, follows Bob, Alice can also see Bob’s posts on the Local Timeline – they just won’t show up in Alice’s feed.

I agree, it’s a terrible user experience, and it’s the biggest thing I want to see the Mastodon developers fix :slightly_smiling_face:

Oh, okay, fair enough !
Thanks for your explanation and your patience, it’s indeed a strange behaviour !

Let’s hope it can be improved in the future :slight_smile: