Posts stopped federating, continue not federating

So, I found out, that your posts are only shown up in the replys section on Mastodon. Can you verify that? Have you extend/changed something using filters?

…I don’t know what you mean by showing up in replies section. The new posts haven’t shown up as replies to anything in my wordpress blog’s profile as seen from my mastodon instance either, so I’m again very confused.

I didn’t make any changes between the posts federating and not federating other than installing updates as they came in, however.

My installed and active plugins are:

ActivityPub
Advanced Excerpt
Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection
Include Mastodon Feed
JournalPress
Weather Station

Just in case that’s relevant to anything. I’ve had all of them installed since the blog went up except Weather Station, which I installed a few months ago, before things stopped working.

I meant the section I marked with the arrow, but I just realized that your latest posts show up nicely.

https://pasteboard.co/FkLl0m8aOjBM.png

…wtf? You can see them?

None of my posts are showing up at my mastodon instance, the one I run on a different box on the same subnet. But you can see them from a mastodon instance?

I’m running 4.2.1, are you running an older version?

Okay, so. I unfollowed my blog account and refollowed it, then went back and started unpublishing and republishing my posts, at the cost of some comments… and after a couple of that, posts started showing up on my mastodon instance again.

I don’t know why. Right now, we’re federating to my mastodon instance again and I don’t know what changed, but something definitely happened and follow/refollow combined with unpublish/republish fixed something.

I know that’s not really helpful but it’s what I’ve got. Follow/refollow alone didn’t fix anything, I’d tried that many times, but that plus unpublish/republish did.

What do you mean with “unpublish”? Doesn’t update the post work as well?

When federation wasn’t happening to my mastodon instance, update did not work either. Now that federation is working again, update also works.

“Unpublish” is what it says happens when you go into the editor of a published post and click on “switch to draft.” It unpublishes the story, not just on the wordpress blog, but shares of the post get deleted as well. (E.g., if I also cross-posted it to Dreamwidth, that version also gets deleted.)

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by solarbird.

Well, I’m back again.

Once again, wordpress posts stopped federating to my Mastodon instance. They just never showed up, and if the Mastodon copy of the profile was viewed, none of the new posts appeared in it. Mastodon was able to re-fetch the profile, but the missing posts continued not to appear.

This time getting it going again was cleaner. From my Mastodon account, if I unfollow my WordPress blog, then follow it again, and then go to my blog and switch my latest post back to draft, and then publish it again, it showed up as expected.

Published posts that I did _not_ switch back to draft and then re-publish never appeared in my timeline or in the Mastodon profile for the WordPress account.

A simple edit of a missing post was not enough to make the post appear in my timeline. It had to be reverted to draft (unpublished), then published again in order to become visible to Mastodon.

Basically, what it looks like is that “Follow” works for about a week, maybe two, then stops working. The WordPress account still appears to be followed (both in the Mastodon profile and as viewed from WordPress), but new posts stop appearing and never appear until the Mastodon follower unfollows and then re-follows the blog, and the most recent WordPress blog post is unpublished and re-published.

Links:

My blog: https://solarbird.net/blog

My blog’s profile on Mastodon: https://mastodon.murkworks.net/@[email protected] – note the big gap between November 18th and November 27th. There were posts, they simply didn’t federate.

The post that I reverted-to-draft then re-published to make it visible, as seen on Mastodon: https://mastodon.murkworks.net/@[email protected]/111485225322980545

The same post, on the WordPress blog: https://solarbird.net/blog/2023/11/27/fascism-watch-for-2023-11-27-clearing-the-docket-part-2/

A post which did not and has never Federated, from that gap period: https://solarbird.net/blog/2023/11/27/fascism-watch-for-27-november-2023-clearing-out-the-queue-on-anti-lgbtq-warfare/

It seems to work as expected on Mastodon.social. I see all your post including the latest ones.

Can you maybe give me some insights about your instance? Where do you host Mastodon, is it a special hosting provider or have you set it up, …?

Is it maybe possible to have an account on your instance to help with debugging?

I host it locally my instance a machine physically in the server closet of my building, so I have all the access one could ever want. I don’t use docker, but that’s a standard supported configuration choice, so.

I don’t mind giving you an account for debugging, that’s fine. I can send you an invitation though I will obviously need an email address. My instance is near-vanilla 4.2.1 with small changes to increase post size, home timeline size, and provide BirdUI as an optional theme. I also run a replies-fetcher as a separate task, but it’s entirely separate and client-side, no server-API access at all.

I think Sentynel might have found the issue: https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/pull/588

Can you maybe verify it with the latest version from GitHub?

If not, I plan to release a new version early next week!

Wow that would definitely hit me, I’ve followers from well over 10 different instances on my first page of followers alone. And if what’s happening is that I’m restacking the list of servers with unfollow and refollowing that would also explain why that works.

Problem is I don’t really know how to re-create it other than waiting for it to happen again. But this definitely sounds like it could super be it. I’ve been pretty sure for a while that most of my Federation followers aren’t seeing my posts and, well, this would absolutely be in line with that.

What file would I grab to try it early? Just activitypub.php or more?

I just released v1.3.0 that should fix this issue!

Excited! Installing and trying now. ??

AAAAAAA THREADS WORK THIS IS SO AWESOME

just wanted to say thanks for that ??