Mastodon: Remote avatars and user info updates inconsistently

[kuro5hin]

I see strange inconsistencies in when remote user avatars appear and when they don't.

First example:

A remote user followed me, no avatar in the notifications column:

I clicked the user to open it in the right column, still no avatar:

I clicked the user's avatar image to open their actual public url in a new tab, and they do have an avatar set:

But nothing I do locally makes it update for me. I still only get a default avatar in my own instance.

Second example:

I see a toot by a remote user in my federated timeline. No user avatar:

I click the avatar to open their account in the right column, and after a moment, the avatar and user info _does_ appear:

Now when I go back to the federated timeline, the avatar remains.

This doesn't happen with everyone -- it's a relatively small proportion of accounts, but it's been quite constant. I'm currently running 470eb0042ea99e0632ccc62a0b7c01e910f70491.

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• [✅ ] I searched or browsed the repo’s other issues to ensure this is not a duplicate.

[kuro5hin]

Update: The "ninja" one did eventually appear by itself! Others don't (unless, maybe, eventually they do???). I am happy to do any kind of digging in logs or databases or anything that would help track down whether this is just how things are or there's actually a bug somewhere.

[Gargron]

They update in the background (sidekiq) since recently. Could be reason for delays if queues are busy.

[rhaamo]

Ah ! Not the single one definitely having this issue, as my instance is single user for now it would be strange to have queue busy more than few seconds.

[maximeborges]

Same problem as I already said on Discord, my instance has only 4 members but I'm the only one active, and I really only have a few toots on my federated time line per day, and I'm not receiveing/sending more than 20 toots a day. So Sidekiq souldn't be busy at all and be able to pull the data in less than 10 hours, and it's not even the case so it would certainly be a problem on the server side...

[wxcafe]

I have the same thing happening semi-regularly. My Sidekiq queues are pretty empty too. This seems to come from somewhere else

[blakebarnett]

Seeing this also, most remote profile pictures never show up, but some do. Queues are not busy at all (fairly new instance)

[zaksoup]

I'm seeing this as well. on b22b2cbfacdaef2441d14f401c95863d8ca2e66c

[zaksoup]

@blakebarnett @wxcafe @maximeborges @kuro5hin etc, I just noticed that my start command for the sidekiq process did not have the new pull queue. can you all double check that your start command matches what's currently in the procfile? Updating the sidekiq start command to bundle exec sidekiq -q default -q push -q pull -q mailers has solved this issue for me...

[wxcafe]

yeah it does for me.

[blakebarnett]

Mine didn’t at first, and I was hoping it would solve the issue as well, but it’s been properly running for 2+ days now and still avatars are quite slow to show up or never do in some cases. Media attachments are always immediate however.

On Apr 12, 2017, at 1:13 AM, wxcafé [e-mail] wrote:

yeah it does for me.

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[wxcafe]

that's normal. We were talking about remote user's profile pictures never showing up, which is /not normal/

[wxcafe]

yes, that's because they're remote users. Hover over the "followers" count and you'll see a tooltip that says exactly this. This is expected behavior.

[wxcafe]

Look. Each instance only has information about a remote user from when that user started federating with that specific instance, so you only see follows/toots/whatever since then. THIS IS EXPECTED BEHAVIOR. This issue is NOT the place to talk about this.

[wolfteeth]

Been having the avatar issue with a couple remote users I follow on my small instance (9 users, most not very active). It's weird that someone I actually follow doesn't have their avatar show up. Looking at their remote profile, they do have an avatar.

[Gargron]

Has this been an issue in the latest releases? It doesn't seem so, and individual troubleshooting cases are better served on discourse.joinmastodon.org, or stackoverflow

[wolfteeth]

I still see it on v1.4.1.

[Gargron]

@wolfteeth Could it be some remnant of previous failures, i.e. your server thinks it downloaded the avatar, but actually the file isn't there? And the server won't redownload the avatar unless its original URL changes. This might be resolved by adding functionality for #2848

[wolfteeth]

@Gargron that could be. I can wait and see.

[duxovni]

I'm still seeing this issue now on v1.4.6, with users I haven't previously looked at.

[Gargron]

Avatars are fetched in the background so first look up is gonna give empty profile.

[duxovni]

OK, but my sidekiq queue is empty and I'm still not seeing an avatar.

[MichaelHierweck]

It seems avatar and header images will never be updated, when the account database record was initially created with references to nil for these attributes: avatar_remote_url, header_remote_url.

[wakest]

can anyone else confirm what @MichaelHierweck said above to be true? because that seems like something that might need to be fixed. Just ran into this problem today.

[oe4dns]

I'm also experiencing a, seemingly related, problem. Avatar Pictures from Friendica contacts are never updated at Mastodon while changes are correctly propagated to other Friendica (obviously) and Pleroma instances.

A thought that comes to mind. Could it be that Mastodon only updates a profile picture if its URL changes and not if there is a fixed reference or none at all?

[valvin1]

same as @oe4dns my friendica avatar is not updated on mastodon side.