Federating with Mastodon - Don't boost comments

[UserThre3]

For front end issues, use lemmy-ui

Is your proposal related to a problem?

When I subscribe to a community through Mastodon, from my end the community is seen to boosts all new posts and it's working as expected.

When a Lemmy user comments on the post, the community boosts the individual comment as well. From my testing, all comments are already attached to the original post/boost as AP comments, so this comment boost seems unnecessary and is confusing.

Describe the solution you'd like

Don't "boost" the comments in the same way as posts. Unless there's a technical reason for it, I'd prefer to see a Lemmy post as a Mastodon post/boost and Lemmy comments as comments to the mentioned Mastodon post/boost.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Not federate with Lemmy-instances from Mastodon and instead create a unique user on a Lemmy instance. Seems counter to the federation idea.

[Nutomic]

The way following a Lemmy community from Mastodon works is like this. Mastodon doesnt support the Announce/Create/Page or similar activities used by Lemmy, so we send a specific Announce/Page activity for Mastodon compatibility. This is only done for posts, not comments.

If you see comments boosted from Lemmy, my best guess is that Mastodon recently added support for Announce/Create/Note activities. Did you notice this after a Mastodon upgrade, or is your instance maybe running a Mastodon fork?

[UserThre3]

It's a newly created instance running regular Mastodon 3.5.1, so not sure when the change happened.

If it's relevant, I read that 3.5 (introduced at the start of april) introduced post editing, but it broke some backwards compatibility.

[Nutomic]

@ClearlyClaire Do you know anything about this?

[ClearlyClaire]

Mastodon 3.5.0 added initial support for post editing (the interface to actually edit posts is not enabled yet, to give time to instances to update to compatible versions). I cannot recall any compatibility breakage.

I'm not sure what you mean by Announce/Create/Note, care to elaborate how Lenny behaves regarding to comments?

[Nutomic]

In Lemmy, groups send actions to their followers simply by wrapping them in Announce. So if a user does Create/Note inside a group (to create a comment), the group sends it to followers as Announce/Create/Note.

When i implemented Mastodon federation last November or December, Mastodon couldnt handle such activities, so now we are also sending Announce/Page specifically so posts reach Mastodon/Pleroma. Note that we dont send any Announce/Note (removed in #1914). So the only reason I can think of that Lemmy comments would show as boosted in Mastodon is if you added support for receiving Announce/Create/Note activities.

[ClearlyClaire]

Oh, I understand better. We support Announce (Note) and Announce (Page) but we do not deliberately support Announce (Create), although I can see two occasions where that could actually work:

• the Create activity itself has the same id as an already-known post. This isn't a new behavior and would be an error from the sender's end (although we should maybe to check the type of the activity)
• if the Create activity is dereferenceable, it will be fetched, then Announce (Create (Object)) will be handled as Announce (Object). This is a new behavior from 3.5.0 (Add support for fetching Create and Announce activities by URI mastodon/mastodon#16383) and not completely intended, need to think about it.

[Nutomic]

It cant be the first case, because activity and object ids have different formats in Lemmy, and anyway we dont reuse ids. But our activities are dereferenceable, so it must be the second case.

[UserThre3]

@Nutomic

Thank you for investigating my issue. I see that it's now closed and I'm trying to understand whats happening, please don't take this as impatient bumping of the issue. From my POV it looks like a "wontfix" because Mastodon changed their fetching system?

[Nutomic]

There is nothing we can do about this, it can only be fixed by Mastodon.