Why do federated articles end up in m/random?

wahming@kbin.social to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 8 points –

I can see many articles from other instances that end up in m/random instead of the actual magazine they were posted in. Why is this so? It's pretty annoying to be unable to view, subscribe to, or block those magazines.

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@wahming

Without looking at the exact full data exchange, I can't say for certain. I don't even know if the trigger is as I think it might be.

But you can get a sense of where the information for the magazine account is by looking at this sample payload of what it looks like when a new Article/Thread is created and federated out. There is no "inReplyTo" because this is the initial thread/article, but it would point to the direct url for a previous content, not the magazine.

{
    "@context":
    [
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
        "https://w3id.org/security/v1",
        {
            "ostatus": "http://ostatus.org#",
            "sensitive": "as:sensitive",
            "votersCount": "toot:votersCount"
        }
    ],
    "id": "https://kbindomain/m/testmagazine/t/16",
    "type": "Create",
    "actor": "https://kbindomain/u/demouser",
    "published": "2023-06-17T18:58:26+00:00",
    "to":
    [
        "https://kbindomain/m/testmagazine",
        "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
    ],
    "cc":
    [
        "https://kbindomain/u/demouser/followers"
    ],
    "object":
    {
        "id": "https://kbindomain/m/testmagazine/t/1676",
        "type": "Page",
        "attributedTo": "https://kbindomain/u/demouser",
        "inReplyTo": null,
        "to":
        [
            "https://kbindomain/m/testmagazine",
            "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
        ],
        "cc":
        [
            "https://kbindomain/u/demouser/followers"
        ],
        "name": "Federation Test",
        "content": "<p>Test for the body of the article</p>\n",
        "summary": "Test for the body of the article #testmagazine",
        "mediaType": "text/html",
        "url": "https://kbindomain/m/testmagazine/t/1676",
        "tag":
        [
            {
                "type": "Hashtag",
                "href": "https://kbindomain/tag/testmagazine",
                "tag": "#testmagazine"
            }
        ],
        "commentsEnabled": true,
        "sensitive": false,
        "stickied": false,
        "published": "2023-06-17T18:58:26+00:00",
        "contentMap":
        {
            "en": "<p>Test for the body of the article</p>\n"
        }
    }
}

Just realised your hypothesis doesn't work, as many of the posts I see ending up in m/random have 0 comments, thus there is no way they could have been referred to by a comment/reply before they were federated.

@wahming

For Sure. It might not be comments, but some other way the thread shows up without the magazine information. I have seen the same thing you describe but I haven’t been able to capture data on it. I have a few ideas on how to test different scenarios but I need to figure out how to capture the raw data as well to verify.