List of followers isn't available to Mastodon

Software Mastodon
1

I’ve written my own ActivityPub software which can be followed and post content to followers. That all works.

I have a list of followers available at https://colours.bots.edent.tel/followers

However, when I look at the account on Mastodon, I see this message:

This user has chosen to not make this information available

This user has chosen to not make this information available
This user has chosen to not make this information available764×460 15.1 KB

As far as I can tell, my JSON is correct. It’s served with the proper MIME type. The followers endpoint is mentioned in my Actor document.

Any idea how I can make this information available?

(This was also asked in Issue with Mastodon pulling posts & followers from new ActivityPub integration - #4 by jacliu - but there was no answer about that specific point.)

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2

@eden_t error message is missing from your toot.

3

I don’t know why Mastodon can’t display followers, but according to the spec followers MUST be either an OrderedCollection or a Collection: ActivityPub. In your case it is CollectionPage.

I would also implement pagination, because consumers may put a limit on the number of items in a collection (yours has 981).

4

Thanks, I’ll make that change. Do you know if the pagination limit is documented anywhere?

5

Question: Does Mastodon ever refresh followers or even account information proactively?

From my testing neither opening the page nor running

tootctl accounts refresh Alice@abel

send any web requests. So as long as Mastodon doesn’t make any requests, there is nothing you can do.

As for why Mastodon shows this message, my guess is consequence of a bunch of random unrelated decisions.

6

No, this is just something that a developer might do. Usually a collection page contains 10-20-50 items.

7

Did that actually work? In my case, I was already using an OrderedCollection: https://social.derickrethans.nl/@blog/followers — and I have no luck with Mastodon showing things either.

8

Nope, didn’t work.

I’m now trying to implement the Follower Synchonization Mechanism ActivityPub - Mastodon documentation

3 Likes
9

Alright, this has driven me crazy for over a week and I couldn’t find an answer anywhere on the web so I decided to dive into Mastodon’s code.

The solution is simple: both followers and following need to be paginated, even if either of them is empty. Mastodon retrieves both and simply checks if they have a “first” property. That’s it.

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10

@dfyx HOLY FORKING SHIRTBALLS! That worked!
I tweaked my code to make both paginated, sent some interactions to the account, and now my followers show up!
I owe you a beer (other tasty beverages are available).

11

I’ve also reported it as a bug. This kind of behavior can’t be intentional.

I owe you a beer (other tasty beverages are available).

I’ll keep that in mind if I ever find my way to the UK.

1 Like