I’ve just stumbled into another annoyance in the #Fediverse architecture: thread continuity is broken when an item in the chain is broken.

[drahardja@sfba.social]

I’ve just stumbled into another annoyance in the #Fediverse architecture: thread continuity is broken when an item in the chain is broken.

Suppose there is this thread of posts/replies, made by three users, and I wrote the last reply (C).

A → B → C

Suppose I wanted to find post A. Sadly, I don’t remember what post A contained (or A’s post is not searchable), but I do remember what I wrote in response in C. I look for my reply and find it, but much to my dismay, the poster of B has deleted their post. So now I have:

A → ✵ → C

Since B is missing, I can no longer find A.

I was under the assumption that ActivityPub provides for a tombstone in place of B, which allows the reply chain to continue to be traversed, but I don’t think that’s the case—the tombstone contains no reference to A at all.

This is particularly annoying because the longer the thread, the more likely this is to happen. I wonder if anyone is already looking at this issue?

Edit: issue filed: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/33456

#Mastodon #ActivityPub