Recently, I’ve set up my own Mastodon server and immediately run into the infamous issue of not being able to see my posts from other instances. As it turned out, posts from other servers are cached to be displayed, but caching only happens after somebody starts to follow the profile in question. Because my instance is small, this basically means nobody will see my posts, which ruins the whole point of running my own server.
Is this a Mastodon only issue or is it just the way Fediverse works? Are there any alternatives to Mastodon that allow seeing the entire timeline without following? Does Lemmy share the same issue?
It is a limitation, but I wouldn’t call necessarily an issue, though it is something that happens in any instances.
Not necessarily an issue because you can pull yet unfederated posts by searching for their links or by user interactions. And if everything got pulled at once, with how ActivityPub works, all instances involved would have potential days of downtime, as well as requiring terabytes of storage on the get-go.
And as a means to pull older posts, some softwares have hardcoded search links, like Lemmy itself (iirc), Mbin (the one I use), Mastodon, etc., meaning you can use some redirect script to send posts to your instance’s search page. Also, if you’re on an instance that allows following people (e.g. a Mastodon one), if the person you follow comments or boosts a previously unfederated post or comment, it should get imported into your instance.
And if you use userscripts through e.g. Violentmonkey, here's one for redirecting posts to your instance
https://web.archive.org/web/20260308222546/https://pastebin.com/BF2s9aXr
The userscript is sent through Pastebin because they allow guest posts, and through Internet Archive because I set my documents to expire.
And the script is originally made by an LLM but that I have manually checked for oddities, that the logic is simple enough that chances of the AI hallucinating were already pretty small when generated, that I have been manually expanding since, and that covers most patterns and instances I’ve come across.
Only change you’d need to do is replacing the The/Brain/Bin search links (
https://thebrainbin.org/search?search[q]=) for the pertinent ones for the posts you encounter, e.g. for Mastodon Socialhttps://mastodon.social/search?q=, and for the Lemmy instance Ani.Socialhttps://ani.social/search?q=.Thanks a lot for the script! I just thought of pulling posts automatically using some kind of script a few days ago and there you are telling me about that very thing lol
It’s just how the fediverse works in general. Content is sent to recipients, similar to email. Which includes your followers. But if you’re not a recipient, you never receive the content.
On Lemmy it’s less of an issue for individual users because communities act as relays. They take posts and comments made to them and forward them to all their followers. It is however a problem for communities themselves.
Lemmy does have Lemmy Federate however, which helps improve the reach of its communities. You just enter your community and it’ll use puppet accounts on various instances, both big and small, to subscribe to it, allowing you to reach the world even from a self-hosted instance. I don’t think the Mastodon side has something like that for users.
Oh wow, Lemmy Federate ezplains how I could see posts on small communities, thanks for the info!
If that’s your first Mastodon account, the start on your own instance is harsh. You can join a relay in case you find an open one.
If you already have an account on another mastodon instance, you can migrate your followers, so their instances will get your posts on their federated timelines (and, more important, will show up under their respective hashtags).
Thanks! Didn’t know about relays, will try
If you’re on mastodon (not lemmy) add a relay.
Thanks!
Is it correct the same relay should be added to the instances I want to federate with?
The relay will pull content generated from connected instances to your instance, and send all content you generate to those instances
Got it, thanks!
That’s the way ActivityPub works. Similarly on Lemmy, if no one on instance #1 has joined a particular instance #2 community, then instance #1 won’t ”cache“ that community.
One workaround is to create accounts on other instances and use then to follow yourself.
It’s not “caching”. Fediverse instances mirror the content. It doesn’t get uncached as it gets old. If it did, pulling up a feed of all content on the fediverse for a given date or search, would require your server firing off an http request to every other server on the whole network, waiting for a reply, and then parsing those replies.
That’s not workable. So instead servers mirror, and only sync updates, and only for stuff that the other server has followers/subscribers.
To see “all” content without someone on an instance following said content, every instance would have to mirror the content of every other instance. Again, that’s not workable.
You don’t want to have to download the entire fediverse just get your small single-user istance working.
Oh okay, thanks, I think I understand it better now
Guessing it’s Lemmy too. I can see with post saying it’ll have 10 replies, and when I try to look at them, there reply section is empty.
That’s so weird. There is a pull request for Mastodon that fixes this so it’s definitely not about the protocol. I really can’t understand why this is happening…
