Cleaning up old posts

  • Here’s an odd one. I had this plugin working well for my podcast last year, but had to take a bit of a hiatus from handling social media. In the intervening time, some cool updates came through, like the ability to disable author profiles. The podcast only had one mastodon follower (me!) and I’d only boosted and liked a couple of the earliest posts.

    I quickly realized that any posts since I last pulled one were busted: the blog’s account wasn’t boosting new author posts (we had just released an episode) and my blog-wide custom template wasn’t applying. I disabled the author profiles, then updated a post I’d previously touched in mastodon and resaved it so it would hopefully be update to use the main acct and the main template.

    When I search for that URL on my Mastodon instance now, I get an error: 422 Validation failed: Uri has already been taken. This makes a certain sense to me, even without understanding the specifics of ActivityPub. My instance is having trouble updating the actor or author or whatever AP calls it for that status. That said, is this a fixable problem? I admin my own Mastodon instance, but unfortunately, Mastodon doesn’t make it easy to remove/purge a single remote status.

    Second, posts really don’t want to update to use my custom template, which is a bit baffling. My template is:

    [ap_title]

    Before the Future Came is a podcast that looks at the ideals of Star Trek as we voyage from one episode or film to the next, following a breadcrumb trail of motifs. How is the universe portrayed in Star Trek a truly egalitarian utopia, and how does the world subtly uphold the hegemonic values of our present day?

    [ap_permalink]

    [ap_hashtags]

    I then went to an old post and updated the content with an extraneous space or extra period. When I look at https://beforethefuture.space/podcast/s00e00-welcome-and-programming-note/?activitypub, I see that the excerpt’s content changed with that new space or period, but it still has all the standard WP excerpt stuff it from the Seriously Simple Podcasting format instead of using my AP template.

    I guess my broader question is: should I expect to be able to clean up my old content in these ways? If so, should I be enabling WP’s debug logs to see if applying the template is erroring out?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

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  • Plugin Author Matthias Pfefferle

    (@pfefferle)

    Hey @irrsinn ??

    and sorry for the late reply ??

    This is a really tricky one! Normally you have the process of a migration (Mastodon uses a Move Activity for that) but even that would not touch older posts ??

    It seems that Mastodon does only support content updates, but not a change of the author, so the only thing I can think of is removing the post, but this could result in a permanent block of that specific post (deleted is deleted). I am currently thinking a lot about such cases (renaming of author names, switching from authors to the blog-user, …) but it is very hard to understand how other platforms handle that, because it is not really defined in the sec.

    I am sorry that I have no simple solution to your problem (yet) ??

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