This past June, I put together a write-up about two major approaches to backfilling conversations. The ability to properly backfill conversations means we will be able to make major inroads toward solving the feeling that the fediverse is quiet.

I, alongside several other members of the SWICG Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force (ForumWG) have been working toward building implementor support for Conversational Contexts — the ability to explicitly classify a set of objects as belonging to a conversation, whether that be a topic, reply tree, or similar.

I am happy to report that we have made some wonderful inroads this past few months!

jesseplusplus@mastodon.social has been working closely with the Mastodon team to allow software to backfill from Mastodon — this pull request has now been approved!

I have been working with both nutomic@lemmy.ml and rimu@piefed.social to allow software to backfill from Lemmy and Piefed, respectively. (Lemmy PR, Piefed issue)

This marks a major milestone in the adoption of conversational contexts. With Mastodon on board backfill will be possible with the majority of the microblogiverse. With Lemmy and Piefed on board, backfill will be possible with the majority of the threadiverse.

Remember that pfefferle@mastodon.social was an early adopter of conversational contexts, and we have been able to backfill from WordPress blogs for quite awhile now (so that's the blogiverse too)

I for one, am eagerly awaiting the next version of all of these softwares!!

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[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 34 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Can anyone ELI15 what backfilling conversations means?

[–] wakest@piefed.social 49 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Sometimes you see a post on your home instance and it looks like it has no replies but then you go look at it on the remote view and there are lots of replies. Backfilling is like making sure if you see a post it has all the comments

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 3 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

What's "the remote view"? Never seen that feature in any Lemmy app before. But if it means more comments on Lemmy, I'm all for it.

[–] Natanael@infosec.pub 1 points 16 hours ago

The post you replied to comes from a different instance than your own, so does my answer. When you're logging into your instance, the view of their and mine posts are both remote to you.

Sometimes in Mastodon you'll only see the specific post that you're opening a link to directly, not other posts before or after. This tries to fix that.

[–] pwalker@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Well you have your "home" lemmy instance which you are logged in to. Everything you see goes through your home instance. But many things you will see originate on a completely different "remote" instance. Your home instamce nees to be federated and synced in order to the everything that happens in the remote/origin instance

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I don't use mastodon, but is that an issue for the Threadiverse? I thought all replies are collected by the host instance of the community.

[–] julian@activitypub.space 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

> is that an issue for the Threadiverse? I thought all replies are collected by the host instance of the community.

You're not wrong about that. Threadiverse software (Lemmy, Piefed, and NodeBB too) use something called 1b12 to synchronize content between instances.

If you follow a community, you set up the synchronization from your server to that community from that point forwards.

This is similar, but not quite backfill, which is what happens if you follow a community mid-way and don't have any of that stuff from before.

Also you can't 1b12 synchronize with Mastodon, so that unfortunately is a dead-end, but you would hopefully be able to backfill from Mastodon.

[–] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It may still be missing stuff from before the first person from your home instance joined the community which can make younger communities feel empty.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Ah ok. That's the problem that the major instances solved by having bots auto join all new communities in each other, right?

[–] FundMECFS@anarchist.nexus 3 points 22 hours ago

yep. https://lemmy-federate.com/ lets you do this.

[–] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yup, this removes that need.

Edited to add: and more BTW, including addressing brief network outages messing with sync and other issues, depending on the server type/activitypub implementation.

[–] wakest@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

everything is weaved together! What happenes when a mastodon account responds to a piefed account and then that gets shared by a Friendica account etc.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have no idea :)

[–] wakest@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

My point is that there is never a hard line between any other parts of the fediverse so if there is a new feature or way one part does something it will always have an effect on the other parts.

[–] wakest@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

Wow that is a badly written sentence! I think you get my point tho

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 day ago

AFAIK, It's to solve or mitigate the "Replies from other servers may be missing" issue.

Essentially imagine you are signed in on server A, responding to or looking at a comment from server B. But people on servers C, D and E have faved, boosted or replied to that same comment. Unless you or someone on your server had followed people on the other servers, you can't see those comments or their contributions to the boost count, unless you go to view the comment on server B's site.

Backfilling means server A fetching those other actions from other servers somehow, so that they will show up when you view it from your own server reliably. Examples of that somehow could be, obtaining all the info from server B (localized single source of truth), it could be collected individually from other servers, from a centralized server, or other means.