This past June, I put together a write-up about two major approaches to backfilling conversations. The ability to properly backfill conversations means we will be able to make major inroads toward solving the feeling that the fediverse is quiet.

I, alongside several other members of the SWICG Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force (ForumWG) have been working toward building implementor support for Conversational Contexts — the ability to explicitly classify a set of objects as belonging to a conversation, whether that be a topic, reply tree, or similar.

I am happy to report that we have made some wonderful inroads this past few months!

jesseplusplus@mastodon.social has been working closely with the Mastodon team to allow software to backfill from Mastodon — this pull request has now been approved!

I have been working with both nutomic@lemmy.ml and rimu@piefed.social to allow software to backfill from Lemmy and Piefed, respectively. (Lemmy PR, Piefed issue)

This marks a major milestone in the adoption of conversational contexts. With Mastodon on board backfill will be possible with the majority of the microblogiverse. With Lemmy and Piefed on board, backfill will be possible with the majority of the threadiverse.

Remember that pfefferle@mastodon.social was an early adopter of conversational contexts, and we have been able to backfill from WordPress blogs for quite awhile now (so that's the blogiverse too)

I for one, am eagerly awaiting the next version of all of these softwares!!

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[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 33 points 18 hours ago (15 children)

Can anyone ELI15 what backfilling conversations means?

[–] wakest@piefed.social 46 points 18 hours ago (13 children)

Sometimes you see a post on your home instance and it looks like it has no replies but then you go look at it on the remote view and there are lots of replies. Backfilling is like making sure if you see a post it has all the comments

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 8 points 18 hours ago (9 children)

I don't use mastodon, but is that an issue for the Threadiverse? I thought all replies are collected by the host instance of the community.

[–] julian@activitypub.space 12 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

> is that an issue for the Threadiverse? I thought all replies are collected by the host instance of the community.

You're not wrong about that. Threadiverse software (Lemmy, Piefed, and NodeBB too) use something called 1b12 to synchronize content between instances.

If you follow a community, you set up the synchronization from your server to that community from that point forwards.

This is similar, but not quite backfill, which is what happens if you follow a community mid-way and don't have any of that stuff from before.

Also you can't 1b12 synchronize with Mastodon, so that unfortunately is a dead-end, but you would hopefully be able to backfill from Mastodon.

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