Backfill statuses from remote accounts when first subscribed

[Gargron]

[mjankowski]

I'd like to take a crack at this, but am still trying to wrap my head around the world of services/workers and which things are triggered when.

My guess here is that somewhere in the collection of remote follow services and workers we want to add a background worker task which pulls the feed of the remote account which was just followed, and import the last 5 or 10 or so items.

The other thing I'm struggling to locate is any code which is effectively "go grab this account's atom feed and import some entries" ... it strikes me as possible that this doesn't exist, because all statuses are pushed onto the server and never (yet) pulled?

Any pointers here are appreciated!

[Gargron]

@mjankowski The main roadblock to this is actually #1059, because if you went back and imported 5 statuses from an account that last posted 6 months ago, you would get 5 6mo-old posts on the top of the public timeline (and potentially home timelines as well)

So this should probably stay a wontfix until something is done about IDs and their sorting.

[mjankowski]

Thanks, I read that thread and looked at more code, and I agree that backfilling is blocked on improving the ordering approach to either get away from ID-sorting, or make ID-sorting reliable for backfilled records. I'll pause on this, and leave a comment over there.

[deutrino]

#3307 is about accurate follower counts, but in the comments I discuss some implementation ideas which could theoretically encompass this.