New posts are not federating

I should also mention I’m using the NGINX config for Flywheel that Piper and Matthias figured out in October 2023.

@nsmsn Your author page is throwing a 404. Seems like a Let’s Encrypt Conflict. Did your .htaccess file get changed when you were updating your site?

https://webfinger.net/lookup/?resource=https%3A%2F%2Fnicksimson.com%2Fauthor%2Fnick

@tnolte it seems that Nick disabled Author pages and only goes with the Blog-User.

The blog user are properly configured and also your posts (content negotiation). A post will also indexed properly if added to Mastodon by hand. So it seems a problem with the cron and/or publishing mechanism.

Have you set up a cron as systems cron, to get scheduled events processed even if no one visits your site?

• This reply was modified 10 months ago by Matthias Pfefferle.

ah, OK, ????

@pfefferle So I don’t really know all the steps to set up a cron, but my hosting company did refer me to cron-job.org. I have that configured to run a cron event on my website at an hourly interval.

Like I said, I don’t know if I have it set up correctly. Do I need to have my host make some changes to a configuration file or the cron events themselves?

• This reply was modified 10 months ago by Nick Simson.

@pfefferle How would I add a post to Mastodon by hand from my blog?

After I set up ActivityPub successfully on my site, I noticed my site has a profile on Micro.blog (blogging platform connected to ActivityPub). The posts there seem to be federating, but I can’t find the latest in Mastodon for whatever reason.

• This reply was modified 10 months ago by Nick Simson.

@pfefferle I heard back from my hosting company’s support technician:

I checked on my end and it looks like the number of cron jobs is increasing again. At the moment there are 1246 cron jobs and most of them appear to be related to the activitypub_send_activity cron event. When I tried to execute them manually via CLI, the site ran into a timeout which I suspect is related to the high number of jobs.

Here’s an error my support technician highlighted, that kept popping up.

PHP message: Cron unschedule event error for hook: activitypub_send_activity, Error code: could_not_set, Error message: The cron event list could not be saved., Data: {"schedule":false,"args":[{"ID":1322,"post_author":"2","post_date":"2023-10-04 14:30:18","post_date_gmt":"2023-10-04 20:30:18","post_content":"<!-- wp:indieblocks\/bookmark {\"customTitle\":true,\"empty\":false} -->\n<div class=\"wp-block-indieblocks-bookmark\"><div class=\"u-bookmark-of h-cite\"><p><i>Bookmarked <a class=\"u-url p-name\" href=\"https:\/\/www.remarpro.com\/plugins\/travelers-map\/\">Travelers' Map<\/a> by <span class=\"p-author\">Camille Verrier<\/span>.<\/i><\/p><\/div><div class=\"e-content\"><!-- wp:paragraph -->\n<p>Travelers' Map looks like a nifty <a href=\"https:\/\/www.remarpro.com\/plugins\/travelers-map\/\">WordPress plugin<\/a>. I've been interested in adding some location-based functionality to my site, mainly with my posts"

This particular post was from earlier in October, before I successfully got the plugin running on Flywheel hosting.

Either that error message was cutoff or there is an escaping issue that is causing that to not be able to be processed correctly and erroring out. I haven’t looked at the recent code but is there something new that would be attempting to reprocess old messages. I thought in general old ActivityPub messages were never supposed to be backfilling and attempting to be sent out, but perhaps that is generally a Mastodon issue and not generally an issue for ActivityPub?

So this is interesting, I just took a look at my sites cron and I too have thousands of ActivityPub cron events, specifically activitypub_delete_actor_interactions starting on 2024-01-16 and running through to today. These are different, but do seem to indicate an issue with the ActivityPub cron events handling or something.

@pfefferle were there changes recently with cron events?

@nsmsn did you have any of these cron events or just the activitypub_send_activity cron events?

@tnolte I installed the WP Crontrol plugin today and I can see 793 results for activitypub_delete_actor_interactions in my cron events.

In addition to the activitypub_send_activity events, I also see a lot of activitypub_send_update_activity events.

Now the changes I made in the staging environment were mainly converting a lot of WordPress categories to tags, and I am using the ActivityPub [ap_hashtags] shortcode to style my posts output.

Some of the newer posts are starting to appear in Mastodon, but it is like a two day delay or so.

@nsmsn so here is something interesting. Last week I had simply viewed one of my posts on my website, and somehow it showed up as “edited” on Mastodon in my feed, even though I didn’t actually edit anything. I’m wondering if those category to tag changes you made caused a massive creation of sends to update posts.

• This reply was modified 10 months ago by Tim Nolte.

@tnolte That’s very interesting. Now I’m tempted to delete some of these activitypub cron events, like the ones for posts older than when I set up ActivityPub, or all the activitypub_delete_actor_interactions

Do you think that would mess anything up?

@nsmsn wel, for better or worse, I deleted all of the 3000+ delete events that were stuck in my queue for the past 6 days. We’ll see if that causes any issues. I mean theoretically it would be your posts out on the Fediverse that would not get the updates from your site, however if it’s posts you had prior to ActivityPub installed then it would seem there really wouldn’t be anything to update.

Going to go ahead and mark this as resolved. With some help from my host I cleaned up a bunch of cron events and now the plugin is finally working as before.

I did the classic blogger thing and wrote up how I broke ActivityPub on my site and the steps I took to fix it, in case it helps anyone else out there.