Why ActivityPub refuses to publish moved discussion topics

Software Discourse
1

I had a conversation with two AI personas. When I was ready, I moved that topic into my personal category for editing — math needed finetuning, etc. After that, I used the timer to publish the topic in the public category.

I knew that ActivityPub refuses to publish a topic if it is moved from one category to another in any way, and that happened this time too.

No big deal, because I can do it manually.

The topic is this:

https://foorumi.katiska.eu/t/onko-lihavuus-ekoteko/14642

Then I opened that… ActivityPub thingy and delivered post #1 to followers. That went smoothly, and I saw this, as expected:

Because I wanted the whole discussion to be published too, since showing just the first one is quite seldom useful to anyone (yes, I know, Mastodon has its own issues with that), I opened Topic admin:

I clicked Publish all posts (I reckoned Discourse has abandoned that American all-capitalize style ), the text changed, and I returned to the topic.

Except, posts weren’t published. OP was okay, though. So I opened Topic admin, and it was still showing the same options. It just refuses to publish all posts.

Why is Post actions still offering Deliver post #1 when it already did that, and I could see it on Mastodon?

Logs don’t show anything, and Discourse is quite fresh — I did an upgrade yesterday, but this has happened earlier too.

I would guess there are two possible reasons for that:

  • The AP plugin dislikes category changes, even if it happens from a non-federated category and timed publishing is used.
  • The AP plugin can’t understand AI personas and/or their minus IDs, or something.

I know how to bypass this, but it isn’t suitable for every situation. All I need to do is copy the whole AI conversation and paste it into a new topic using [details][/details], but that looks sometimes strange in the forum and makes reading harder in Mastodon (sure, if all posts of a topic are reachable only via a web link, that makes reading quite hard too; people don’t like outgoing links much).

I haven’t tried if the same happens when every participant is a real human. I haven’t had a suitable topic yet for testing.



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2

Jagster:

I clicked Publish all posts (I reckoned Discourse has abandoned that American all-capitalize style ), the text changed, and I returned to the topic.

Except, posts weren’t published.

When you say the posts weren’t published, do you mean the ActivityPub status of the post within Discourse was still unpublished?



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3

Yes. It still shows unpublished icon, and text.

And I couldn’t find those posts anywhere via Mastodon (that could come from my lack of skills too).



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4

What happens if you publish the posts individually? i.e. go into the ActivityPub Post Admin for Post #2 and click publish? Also, are there any logs that appear when you try this?



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5

It works. But: Publish Post #2 and deliver it to the followers of the Group Actors. That road would be quite… noisy and spammy.

Nothing in logs, except in that case, of course, normal delivery infos. But nothing when I try to publish all posts of a topic, but not delivery to followers of category actor.



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6

Jagster:

It works.

Good.

Jagster:

Publish Post #2 and deliver it to the followers of the Group Actors. That road would be quite… noisy and spammy.

How come?

Jagster:

But nothing when I try to publish all posts of a topic, but not delivery to followers of category actor.

I see. So just to confirm, you’re saying that this is what happened:

  1. Create topic A, a conversation with two Ai personas, in category A.
  2. Move the topic from a category A to category B, a private category.
  3. Schedule the publication of topic A from category B to category C, a public category.
  4. When topic A is published in category C go into the ActivityPub admin and click “Publish Post #1”. This published and delivered post 1 of topic A as expected.
  5. Then go again into the ActivityPub admin of topic A and click “Publish All Posts”. The posts in topic A were not published as expected.
  6. Publishing individual posts in topic A works as expected.

Is that correct?



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7

angus:

  • Create topic A, a conversation with two Ai personas, in category A.
  • Move the topic from a category A to category B, a private category.
  • Create a private message conversation A with two AI personas, and that is topic A, kind of
  • Move PM-conversation A to category B, a private category

Rest is correct.

angus:
Jagster:

would be quite… noisy and spammy.

How come?

What I tried first would publish all, but not deliver posts to followers of group actor. Only OP would be delivered. So (Mastodon) follower sees only OP and right amount of comments.

But if I publish and deliver every post individually, followers of group actor sees them all.

The difference is this:

  • followers get only one post/message/toot and nothing more, even if all posts of topic would be published (and this is one of three main reasons why getting followers from Fediverse/Mastodon is so difficult)
  • Now followers get individual posts/messages/toots as many as I send, aka. how many posts there is in a topic, and of I publish those posts in bulk, because I’m not watching action of forums all the time, it will be noisy, even spammy’ish, if a follower gets fast 10,40 or 100 messages


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8

I appreciate the response. It's going to take me a few days to turn my attention to this. There are a number of variables in play here (i.e. PMs, Ai personas etc), so it's going to require some dedicated attention and testing.



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9

Thanks. Take your time. This isn’t really major one anyway.



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10

Just FYI: it happens with all-human topics too, if those are old enough, aka. written before federation time.

So I would make one bold claim: it happens when a longer topic should be published all in once (and yet AI-personas are an issue ^[they are problematic for Discourse Translator too, but that is totally different ball game])



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