Anybody know what triggers a profile re-fetch in #mastodon ?
After an instance accessed a remote account for the first time, it fetches name, avatar, number of followers etc. When will it fetch it next to potentially update?
@J12t when we receive an Update for this account, and more recently when we receive a new status and the account has not been refreshed in the last 7 days
@J12t same for me, I was surprised we did not do it so I had it implemented.
We need a similar periodic check on verified links now, but it has a few complexities.
Can't answer that. Will only mention that I would consider it good practice to put an updated timestamp on the actor record, with a separate one on the profile photo and send an Update/(Person,Group, etc.) activity to your peeps when they change.
Probably a good idea to put a timestamp on followers and following as well, but my server has better things to do than try and keep accurate follower counts for the whole known fediverse. We have enough trouble dealing with the thousands/millions/? of Delete/Actor messages whenever anybody from anywhere in the Mastodon galaxy of the fediverse removes an account.
@mikedev Well, the fediverse is largely not acquainted with the idea of (eventual) consistency. A problem IMHO but hard to fix at this point.
Would you know this? When you observe DELETEs on Actors, in your experience, were they all sent from the instance that hosted the actor, or are there cases where other instances send it? Like some instance from where the post was reshared and reached an audience the original server didn't know about.
It's possible other instances can send these, and I can't rule them out - however the vast majority are sent by the original instance that hosted that actor. And each one is sent to every site in the known fediverse; regardless of whether they have ever interacted with the actor in question.
While I can see that as one way to ensure that the existence of that particular identity is completely removed from the fediverse, it doesn't really scale.
And to add insult to injury - if the identity is nomadic (I'm working on this now) it will require a bit more nuance - as you aren't removing the identity; but only a particular location for that identity.
@mikedev I meant to ask you about your nomadic identity work in the ActivityPub part of universe ... any particular place that I should be following? There is some SSO talk re-emerging in certain quarters and it would be nice to not re-invent the wheel... to me at least :-)
@robb You mean when it receives an UPDATE activity on the Actor object? But the other instance would only do that if there were an actual follower on the local instance, what about if it only got there because somebody was mentioned etc?
I’m not sure now? I suppose if someone looked up the user which would cause a fetch on the instance it would be updated? I’m a bit out of my depth with this part of it.
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