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rimu@piefed.social

New instance and community histories question (piefed.social)

submitted 6 days ago by Getting6409@piefed.social to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social

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This is probably more of a fundamental question on federation, but in the scenario that you bring online a new piefed instance with the intention of opening it for public registrations, what's the deal on remote communities history? From what I read I think it goes something like this:

the new instance will only make available content it has obtained by federation since it went live
end user makes an account, adds a community, and only sees what's been obtained via federation since the instance went live
if they really really want to engage with a post from the time before the instance went live they need to get the original post url from the source and search it; this allows the instance to pull in that specific post and after that the user can interact with it as normal.

Is that about it? I just want to make sure there aren't any options for bulk community post imports. I've been messing with getting an instance stood up and was initially surprised at how empty things are after the bulk community import; but after reading around a bit I'm arriving at the (hopefully correct) understanding that a new instance will just need to be up and federating for a while to be an instance that will be useful for browsing.

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[–] jollyroberts@jolly-piefed.jomandoa.net 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

That's basically right yeah. Newly followed communities will have some backfill, like 50 posts I think, but no massive get-the-while-history automation exists.

The more active communities add content fairly quickly

[–] rimu@piefed.social 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

I've recently made it so that if you're back-filling a PieFed community the replies on the posts get retrieved too.

It's not possible with Lemmy because Lemmy chose not to provide a replies collection on a post. It looks like v1.0 of Lemmy might have an equivalent that we can use. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5283

[–] Getting6409@piefed.social 1 points 6 days ago

Nice, that certainly helps giving these initial community imports some "life."

I figured out my lack of community posts was due to rapidly tearing down and re-deploying my piefed stack on the same domain. I think some federation began prior to the tear-down-then-re-deploy, so when the latest iteration began federating there were invalid signature errors for most activities since a new key was introduced. Result was a bunch of communities with no posts.

It would be nice to have some more targeted community import options as this thing matures. Something like an admin input for backfill value on the bulk import operations, or the option to to give a backfill value when doing specific community imports.