Mastodon: Ability to forcefully update remote user data

[shleeable]

Pitch

How do I force the refresh and get this data?
Shouldn't there be a [pull user data] button?

Motivation

because having an empty follow list is frustrating.

[ThibG]

Remote follow lists are never fetched. Those things only show people followed/following from your instance, not the whole thing (but that may be confusing).

[Brawaru]

This is really confusing, actually. Can we maybe have a Mastodon mascot on the bottom of this list holding a magnifier on traces with the text on above “Missing something?” and next line “We only show you who this person follows on this instance. To see full picture, open their remote profile.” / “We only show you who follows this person from this instance. To see full picture, open their remote profile.”

Also, when person hides their follows/followers, the same text shown from what I remember, which I don't really think it should. “Missing something?”, “This person decided to hide their followers.” / “This person decided to hide their follows.” This won't hurt anyone, quite the opposite — it would help dealing with confusion that Mastodon currently puts users in.

[shleeable]

The issue with the above is the remote follow method is damn painful and a horrible UX experience. Having to complete the form on every follow takes too long.

Remote follow lists are never fetched. Those things only show people followed/following from _your_ instance, not the whole thing (but that may be confusing).

I don't care if it's opt in. just give us a little button to press on accounts.

also. the same thing applied to accounts historical toots.. you should have the ability to sync older toots as opt-in

[ThibG]

It doesn't make much sense to have. It is only useful for display, pretty expensive to get, and is very likely to get stale fast.

[Brawaru]

14031 does exactly what I proposed, adding buttons to remote profiles here and there (including link to old toots); thanks to @Gargron for implementing that!

Do you think it helps/resolves the issue? I certainly think it's an improvement for UX.

[bluss]

There is an API that fetches the relevant info, is that right? The followers method. Why is it too expensive to use? To show something a bit better here would make the federation experience a lot smoother.

[ThibG]

I guess there are two ways one could do this:

• process the full list for local mirroring: this can be expensive if the person has a lot of followers, and maintaining the list up-to-date would probably require re-fetching it in full periodically
• proxy paginating requests: this would avoid caching etc., but this introduces more synchronous queries, which Rails is bad at, furthermore, it makes us dependent on the exact way pagination is implemented on the remote server (if implemented at all), without caching, this could also mean quite a lot of requests

in both cases, any unknown user would have to be fetched, which is another set of request to one or more external server for each, which is expensive