Thanks, this might be something we need to fix in receiving posts from Friendica. I’m looking into it.
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Adding to that, slightly related (though the opposite direction): I responded …
https://micro.blog/z428/20069491
… to a post coming from Hubzilla, I also am able to read most of the thread on micro.blog but my response apparently doesn’t make it back “there”:
Not sure whether that’s the same issue…?
(Any news or ways to help, here, in order to get rid of this issue…?
)
Some observations of the current state: “Inbound” federation (Mastodon, Friendica users to micro.blog) seems slightly better now for whichever reasons, outbound federation (micro.blog to Mastodon, Friendica) in most cases still doesn’t work at all here.
I recently started having issues with posts with titles failing to crosspost.
(Any news on this? Unfortunately, still no success for my accounts and contacts, both ways mostly…
)
Still not working with my main account, I filed an issue with Friendica - Federation with micro.blog broken · Issue #13366 · friendica/friendica · GitHub - as it somehow seems to relate to their end. Meanwhile on Mastodon things seem to have settled or improved recently, at least with the accounts I’m using to test.
Note that Friendica specifically mentions Mastodon, not ActivityPub.
You can directly connect to anyone on Friendica, Mastodon, Diaspora, GnuSocial, Pleroma, or Hubzilla, regardless where each user profile is hosted.
My guess is they may use the Mastodon API and not actually have support for subscribing to a pure ActivityPub standard stream.
I personally think, though, this is merely an issue of website updates to be honest. Like, GnuSocial doesn’t matter very much anymore, whereas “newer” platforms that work just flawlessly with Friendica (such as Calckey, Misskey, Lemmy and all that other stuff) are completely missing out here. Also, one of the Friendica core devs (Michael Vogel) has been rather early involved with ActivityPub spec as far as I know so I don’t see much of an issue here.
(That said, they basically stated that micro.blog federation apparently hasn’t been tested as of now - and the actual fact it needs testing for individual platforms makes me wonder what state this standard has, but that’s just slightly related here I guess…)
ActivityPub, the standard, has no reference implementation or test suite. So it’s a document describing how it should work. As a result, there’s a surprising amount of edge cases or places to trip up in any implementation.
I think it’s more than just edge cases. As an example, just a conversation I had recently on a messenger: A loose contact at some point asked me whether he should unfollow me as I don’t seem interested in “interaction” here. Turns out: He used his Mastodon account to follow my micro.blog blog and then went through leaving likes on a load of my posts. Unfortunately, both went absolutely unnoticed as micro.blog neither notifies about new followers nor gives me an insight into whether some ActivityPub contact has left “likes” on some of my posts. These are interactions someone can do with “me” without me even noticing.
At this point, I tend to be surprised ActivitPub-based Fediverse somehow works, at all. I’ve been into this kind of stuff for roughly two decades and a half now (internally / in enterprise applications, though), and the idea of building a protocol without agreeing upon basic capabilities seems a rather … disputable design approach, to be polite. It’s weird to have a tool where, on one end, people can start interactions that go totally unnoticed by the recipient without their client, their platform, … telling them that maybe this interaction will end up unseen because the recipients system doesn’t feel like supporting this particular feature (like WriteFreely, when I last checked, didn’t have an understanding of comments and used ActivityPub as a write-only channel for distributing posts - so you could even write comments and comments without anyone noticing). Slightly off-topic here, but then again maybe not. 
Well but all of that is sort of the point, and also why interoperability is not the same thing as “it functions the same”. Micro.blog as a tool doesn’t do follower counts or likes, so it doesn’t implement that for users to see. That’s not a failure of interoperability per se. A lot of questions on these forums come down to “Why doesn’t MB work exactly like some other tool it says it integrates with?” But just like any software I’ve ever used that “integrates”, integration means specific features and functions that make sense for that software work.
We can set aside the pathology of someone who thinks they need permission to follow you or are owed interactions by someone they follow, especially if their primary mode of interaction with you is likes.
I don’t generally disagree here; however my point is slightly elsewhere: This approach to interoperability is a tad difficult not because systems by choice behave in a certain way but because this kind of interoperability makes it incredibly difficult (not to say “impossible”) for others to have an idea what kind of communication they can expect to work. That’s, more, like, down the lines of: Whenever I respond to a comment in Mastodon (because, hey, I’m using ActivityPub via Mastodon), of course I expect my recipient to at least see that post. Likewise, sending out an e-mail, we all remember very well messages that appear to be totally “empty” because all they have is something like an HTML body part but an end user client (without in worst case the end user even knowing) defaults to text/plain, for whichever reasons this should be the case in 2023. Not really arguing against interoperability being different than software “functioning the same”, but it might need certain mechanisms to give people a slight clue which kind of shared feature set this interoperability includes in a certain communication. This seems pretty much what mostly killed off XMPP for a load of users: You didn’t know what worked for your recipients, so in worst case you defaulted to the most bare-bone feature set (text/plain messages, no encryption, …) to hopefully work.
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More findings here:
procial.tchncs.de is a Firefish instance (clone of Misskey/Calckey). Same as in Friendica: Accounts can be retrieved. Posts aren’t.
zotum.net is a Hubzilla 9.x instance. picture-only posts are empty.
Use both of them only once in a while, my main painpoint still remaining micro.blog not federating with Friendica, but I wonder, still, whether this is an issue on “their” or on micro.blogs end… and, if the latter, whether this should be resolved.
(Also, translating a question from a communication thread on the Hubzilla forum: What is the exact ActivityPub URL of individual posts coming from micro.blog? I tried to use this - {micro maique} which is what the system showed me, but the Hubzilla people claimed that, for this link, it’s impossible to fetch valid AP JSON data…)
I’m also seeing issues with posts not federating. I follow my micro.blog account from mastodon.social.
- I see all my recent posts here: Micro.blog - @BWLNG
- The last post I saw from my micro.blog account from Mastodon.social was on 2024-04-09 11:29 am
- I’ve posted 3 times since then, but they did not show up in my Mastodon feed AND if I view my federated account’s profile in Ivory, those same three posts are missing
How can I troubleshoot? Is anything logged?
Update: I made two quick posts to test whether they would show up, and of course they both did. Then, I deleted my most recent long post and tried to post it again. I accidentally saved it as a draft before publishing and it DID NOT federate. I then deleted it again and reposted it, making sure to publish without saving a draft first and it DID federate. Wondering if it’s related or just a coincidence.