Replies get an upgrade

Welcome back, oh beloved denizens of the decentralized domain. It’s that time again. Another week, another panting dive into the Fediverse.

We've been working hard to keep up with bug reports from the beta testing so far, fixing as many as we can, and investigating the ones we can't. It's been a busy week, but it really feels like we're getting somewhere!

Very important replies from a PUG-ISO-Standard keyboard.

What's new with ActivityPub?

We've had replies working in Ghost for a couple of months now, but they've been a bit limited. How? Well, you could see replies coming into your notifications and click on them, but it would only open that individual post and no others. You couldn't see the parent post being replied to, and you couldn't see any replies from others. This week, that got a sizable upgrade.

Now replies are threaded in and loaded alongside the thing they're replying to, and you can navigate across replies in the same way you would expect on most other platforms.

It's a simple change from a user standpoint, but a relatively complex one from a code standpoint. The experience of using the app to browse conversations now, though, is a pretty dramatic improvement!

Alongside working on replies, we also worked on bugs and a NodeInfo endpoint. The latter means that each Ghost instance using ActivityPub will now output some simple metadata, making it possible to track how many Ghost publishers are out there in the wild and connected to the Fediverse. So, in the next few days, you should start to see the first few Ghost servers popping up on FediDB — a public directory of Fediverse activity and statistics.

FediDB, Fediverse Network Statistics

FediDB is a cutting-edge service providing detailed statistics and insights into the Fediverse network.

Things are feeling better and better with each passing week now as we fill in the gaps and get everything ~mostly working.

What we're noticing most, now, is that things are feeling a little slow as we process more and more data. Every new post, like, reply and follow is more stuff that we have to process, and so far we've been processing things in a fairly basic way.

So, that's what we're intending to take a look at next!

As you know, architectural changes around data and performance are typically a lot of fun and sometimes lead to analogies about lanes on a highway and/or a complete and total meltdown by your correspondent.

Pray for me.

Until next time, may your posts be plentiful and your replies be threaded.