A while ago joined Pixelfed, and some things really confuse me …

1.) Licenses … on my older posts, the Image shows a content license (like, CC BY-NC-SA), but not on newer ones … there doesn’t seem to be a way to specify a license, or is there?

2.) Followers … some friends joined on other instances, and we followed each other … when I click their profile from MY instance, then I see only myself (seems like they don’t have any other followers on that instance).

If I visit their profile on THEIR instance, I can see they have more followers, but I can’t see the details without logging in (and the account from my instance doesn’t work).

Is that by design?

I can’t even see their profile picture from my instance … my posts seem to show up in their feed though …

3.) I’m using the official app, but I can only see my most recent posts … I made a few posts about a year ago and they don’t show up …

Can someone enlighten me here?

  • astro_ray@piefed.socialEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    1. Don’t know

    2. That is a flaw in activitypub. The federation makes it look like you are the only one following that account because that’s the only information your home instance can gather from the network. As they post new stuff you will see them. Give it some time for your server to federate with their server and you will probably see more details like their profile picture

    3. That sound like a bug in the app

    • megraniaOPEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Hmm ok … the servers are both pretty large so I assume they should be well-federated (if that’s the right term).

      But that flaw kinda means that effectively, information trickles through unpredictably and what you see is quite dependent on which instance you’re on … is that understanding correct?

      • astro_ray@piefed.socialEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        Yes, that is correct. Although, calling it a flaw was a bit wrong on my part. It us by design. Paraphrasing someone on the internet: activitypub federation is pull rather than push. The downside of this is, some info will never reach you. The upside is: self hosting activitypub software is possible even with limited resources.

        • megraniaOPEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          I guess whether it’s a flaw or not depends on your expectations … definitely feels like a big drawback to me …

          • subignition@piefed.socialEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            After the point in time where you made the connection, you will see activity start coming in from their connections. So you should gradually see their followers populate as those people make new posts, which get federated to your instance through your connection to them.

            Especially if the connection you made is the first time the remote instance has been interacted with, it’s going to look barren at first because there is basically no capability to sync history. You can think of it like an RSS feed.

            (This is oversimplified - it’s possible that ActivityPub might allow for historical items to be synced just like RSS publishers can choose to include older data. I would speculate that it’s not commonly done for bandwidth reasons if it is possible.)

            A downside to this is that if you’re trying to read through historical posts (from before you made the connection) you will have to click through to the hosting instance to get a complete view.

            An upside to this is that because you only see content posted after the connection is established, you are guaranteed to be seeing new posts from active users.