Interesting behavior today. Wrote a post. Deleted it because I forgot the picture. Made another post with the copied text and the photo included.
Timeline: shows 2 copies of the new post
Blog: shows 1 copy of the new post
Blog feed: shows 2 copies of the new post
ActivityPub: shows 1 copy of the old post (which I deleted) and 0 copies of the new post
What might cause this? Because the post starts with the same text, is it being treated as the “same” by some parts of the system and “different” by others?
Sounds like there are a couple things going on here. Sorry, this is something we should fix because it can be confusing and hard to unravel when it goes wrong.
For some background, the timeline and blog are technically separate things, so sometimes a deleted post can remain in the timeline. The fix is to click the “Remove” link in the timeline to get rid of it. This shouldn’t usually happen, but could happen if Micro.blog was updating the timeline before the post was deleted from your blog.
ActivityPub is actually driven from the timeline. In other words, when your blog post is added to the timeline, it’s at that point that it is sent to Mastodon followers. However, using the “Remove” link in the timeline should also federate the deletion to Mastodon.
And on top of that, you’re right that the new post and the old post had the same permalink URL because the text was the same, so that probably confused things further, because that’s the identifier used when sending the post to Mastodon and in the RSS/JSON feeds.
I’ll review this and see what we can do to fix it. Thanks!
This is helpful. So it sounds like there is some work to do in the system, but then there is also some guidance that would be helpful to publish on how/when to use “remove” on timeline vs. “delete” on post.