Mastodon: Profiles on a remote instance don't show full follow count or toot list

[wolfteeth]

When I'm logged in on an instance, and visit the profile of a user on a remote instance, their following and follower counts (and lists) appear to reflect only the subset of users in my instance, even though they have followers from other instances. Their toot list is sometimes incomplete as well.

The (incorrect) follow numbers have a '*' next to them in the web interface, which is confusing as there is no explanatory text.

Exploration amongst instances should be seamless for the user who potentially has contacts on many instances.

[wirehack7]

Encountering the same problem. Also not seeing any profile pictures from other instances of users whom I don't follow.

I am seeing error Status because: Validation failed: Username has already been taken kinda often in sidekiq log when it tries to pull info from remote user.

[Miaourt]

Having a similar problem here, profil won't load even if we follow them/ they toot after we follow.
I can see the post-follow toots, but the profile load only if the user interact with us : https://niu.moe/@Technowix/1885

Also, no error on sidekiq/logs :|

EDIT : "old" instances dosn't seem to have the problem, maybe that a new optimisation feature to do-not-load too much for optimising mastodon.social ?

[DeadSuperHero]

This is actually a pretty big problem with adding people from other servers - you have to wait for new posts to start coming in.

Is there a way that Webfinger could fetch a manifest of public posts?

[Miaourt]

@DeadSuperHero That not the issue here tbh.
But yeah, I agree that would be cool to crawl instances a bit to provide federated content to users.

[DeadSuperHero]

You're right, thinking on it further these fall under two categories that are loosely related. Regardless, it might make sense to periodically pull updated information on a profile after following it or looking it up - and that might affect counts as well as content.

[Gargron]

Question to people in this thread experiencing this problem on their instances - is your Sidekiq processing the "pull" queue?

[Miaourt]

Yup, that it right ? :

[Miaourt]

Catched somes errors, if this help @Gargron .

Seem like timeout, the tasks are too long...

[wirehack7]

Mine is processing the queue. Errors are occuring because some instances are offline sometimes (like securitymastod.one). So these time out as in their nature.

[RX14]

I have this issue but I don't see anything in any queues. Maybe I just don't know how to read sidekiq right?

Yet I still can't see profile pics or bios of toots who are federated indirectly (boosted, replied to, etc). I can see when I manually input a URL into the search tool however.

[Cassolotl]

This is something me and a few other users have just been talking about, and one person who's not a Github user suggested I copy-paste their words about this issue over here:

Thing is, I have extensive experience with decentralised systems, and they don't surprise me. This one is constantly surprising me with what it does - and doesn't - do, and my experience tells me that this will be a significant stumbling block for people who expect things to "just work". I suspect it will hinder adoption significantly.

You say clicking through to their profile on their instance is easy, but it's not obvious to me. Why isn't clicking on their name the same thing? It's opaque as to the existence of a difference, let alone what the difference is.

Now that you've told me about it I've tried clicking on a few things that don't look like links and I've found it. Not knowing, associated with non-discoverability, makes the system somewhat user-hostile.

[wolfteeth]

I've never been able to figure out how to get to a remote user's home instance profile without just typing in the expected URL in a different tab. I think that should be the default when I click a remote user profile, display current content from the remote instance.

If the remote is down, I'd rather know the remote isn't responding (show an error saying it's down, try again later) than see cached(?) data and not know it's incomplete.

[rhaamo]

I was investigating my issue about profiles being "empty" and have this error too

Nothing was saved for tag:oc.todon.fr,2017-04-08:objectId=124231:objectType=Status because: Validation failed: Username has already been taken

or

ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid: Validation failed: Username has already been taken

I have the four queues, but I can see the "failed" counter in sidekiq grow... but sidekiq doesn't let investigate with more infos, and the logs, varying for the flow of events are somewhat mixed...

I can also see:

Apr 08 23:18:22 masto-web bundle[5784]:  (7.4ms)  BEGIN
Apr 08 23:18:22 masto-web bundle[5784]: Account Exists (1.8ms)  SELECT  1 AS one FROM "accounts" WHERE "accounts"."username" = $1 AND "accounts"."domain" = $2 LIMIT $3  [["username", "xxx"], ["domain", "toot.cat"], ["LIMIT", 1]]
Apr 08 23:18:22 masto-web bundle[5784]:  (7.0ms)  ROLLBACK
Apr 08 23:18:22 masto-web bundle[5784]: Nothing was saved for tag:unixcorn.xyz,2017-04-08:objectId=44762:objectType=Status because: Validation failed: Username has already been taken

But maybe unrelated.

I don't see what's wront with profiles right now. For most of them click on it or searching the user load them but any "new" profile I can see are empty.

[Lertsenem]

(Isn't that the same as #830?)

[rhaamo]

I don't have issues with posts it seems.
Only profiles as reported by @wirehack7 but I don't know.
The bug I am experiencing should be fixed (but I'm still experiencing it)
But in the same time I seems to have the same one according to some logs as this issue (reported by @wirehack7 )

[lilyball]

I'm having this same issue. I just set up a new single-user instance, and followed @[email protected]. Looking at his profile on his site, he has 289 toots. Looking at it from a different instance, I see 115 toots. Looking at it from my brand new instance, I see 0 toots. So it's definitely not back-filling any info. I also checked Sidekiq, there's 0 failures and it's currently idle, with nothing in the queue.

[cybercatgurrl]

@kballard I'm certainly getting the same behavior on my instance. The only content that's filled out is content created after I interact with that account.

[angristan]

I'm having this behavior, too. But is this a bug ? Because every single instance have the same behavior

[RX14]

The existence of a "pull" redis queue makes me believe that some pulling of data is supposed to happen, however I'm unsure as to exactly which data it's meant to pull when. Maybe @Gargron can clear this up.

[ivansafrin]

Same behavior on our instance as well. If I click on a profile I follow within the page, I see the number of posts from the time I started following them, none of their follows and just myself as the only follower. (If I click on their profile page, all the actual counts are there).

[KellerFuchs]

mastodon.ninetailed.uk seems to also exhibit the behaviour.

[Artoria2e5]

Is it possible, though, to reply to an arbitrary toot with its remote URL given? If someone could give me some workaround like that I would be happier with what I got for now...

Oh, I see #1240.

[jamesmwright]

I am having this issue with my single instance too. When I view people, I see no toots or follows/followers, until I start interacting with them. Has this been fixed? I'm on v1.2.2.

[hugoestradam]

I joined mastodon today. I am seeing this error. It is disorienting.

[stragu]

One example: I follow [email protected] (6 toots and 4 followers currently) but I only see 2 posts and 2 followers when looking at their profile from my account [email protected].

Could it have something to do with differing versions? I am not sure how to check for versions (it would be great to see it on listed on https://instances.mastodon.xyz/list).

[wolfteeth]

I think it is specifically to do with federation. It only shows you toots that were sent to your instance - which can happen for a few different reasons, the most obvious being someone on your instance started following them. But federation only starts after the following starts - earlier toots won't show up.

I imagine the reason why the follower/following counts are wrong is the same. It's only the people following/followed on your instance.

I'm not sure of the reason. Maybe the goal is to avoid putting too much strain on remote servers? It's confusing though.

[BrunoSpy]

Is this linked to #2613 ?
I'm not talking about toots that are not visible, but toots that are definitively missing.
Explanations :
Account 1 on instance 1 ([email protected])
Account 2 on instance 2 ([email protected])
Account 3 on instance 3 ([email protected])
Each accounts following the others

• account 1 posts a toot
• the toot doesn't appear in the timeline of account 2
• the toot appears ine the timeline of account 3

[andrejsavikin]

Can confirm similar behavior. I made a mastodon instance and followed someone on the federation, and waited for them to toot something new so it shows up on my instance. I then shut down the instance completely(keeping the databases) and reopened it after a couple of days. His toots from the point of re-starting the instance and onwards appeared, but his toots during the downtime didn't get re-synced.

[Gargron]

Backloading of toots is not fixed by this, but counts are now more correct thanks to #4840

[deutrino]

I cannot find an issue regarding backloading of toots specifically, does anyone know of one?

This and #3307 are partial duplicates. I proposed a way of improving follow counts in #3307. However, in my view backloading of toots is of equal or greater importance.

Should we change this issue title, or open a new issue (if one does not exist), purely to discuss backloading of toots? I believe my proposal in #3307 could be leveraged as part of the solution to backloading of toots.

[schmittlauch]

@deutrino #34 looks quite relevant for that.

[nightpool]

duplicate of #34