I have a #Fediverse #ActivityPub question:
Why doesn't my client ( #mastodon or #pixelfed ) automatically load the comments from the original page so that all comments are visible?
Is there a technical reason?

@treefit that would overload the server with too much information, unfortunately.

@beaware@social.beaware.live @treefit@fosstodon.org yes and no. I'm working on a solution for this.

NodeBB for example will automatically do this (providing the other end supports it). When posts are retrieved from NodeBB to NodeBB the entire topic is visible.

@julian @treefit well that's neat! but could you specifically address my comment? Wouldn't that cause DDOS type issues on servers with lots of posts/users?

@beaware@social.beaware.live no, I don't believe so. I agree that replicating replies and likes in their entirety to every server ever is an unscalable task, doing so on a conversation by conversation basis is perfectly fine and should be handled without issue by fediverse software.

@treefit
AP works in a push nature, not pull. It may be related to overload on servers.

@danialbehzadi I'm just wondering why clients don't pull on demand to provide a complete view on the comments

@treefit @danialbehzadi some clients support this and some types of fediverse servers also support this. @jonny is currently working on a PR to add a "load more remote conversation" button into Mastodon if I understood right

@liaizon@social.wake.st I'm not entirely sold on the replies collection traversal logic as penned by @jonny@neuromatch.social

It doubles down on the premise that individual notes are isolated entities whose connection to other notes is dictated solely by inReplyTo and replies.

7888 introduces the concept of a conversational context, which is maintained by the original conversation starter. When you have an ad-hoc source like this, you can just ask the context owner to supply the entire set of responses in one single call (or perhaps a few more if paginated.) No replies traversal needed.

@julian @treefit I personally don't have any "horses in this race" other then getting things to work better. I would imagine #fep7888* would need serious "buy in" from Mastodon for it to really take hold as the way forward so if the way @jonny implementing this for Mastodon has potentially more of a likelihood of getting merged this year then I welcome it...

* https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-7888-demystifying-the-context-property/3021/19

@liaizon@social.wake.st you are not wrong about that. @jonny@neuromatch.social's approach works now, but I'm not sure how well it will scale.

It could be perfectly fine. It might not, who knows.

But it's a good thing there's more to the fediverse than Mastodon.

@julian
@liaizon
Yeah. That sounds cool but raises serious problems about trust, moderation, and implementation. Lmk when there is a working implementation of it anywhere, in the meantime I'm gonna try to get something that works deployed

@jonny@neuromatch.social sure! NodeBB has it working now if you want to poke around on BrowserPub, just paste a topic URL into it.

v4.0.0 can pull entire topics in already (assuming the remote end supports it.)

When v4.1 drops you'll be able to do this via the topic URL itself.