blueark.app and bridgy

[renatolond]

Hey!

I noticed the other day a bridged account on the Fediverse with some weird post dates. There were posts from 2015 but I didn't have time to look into it and forgot about it.

Then, today I saw it again and they said they are using https://blueark.app/ to import their Twitter archive into their Bluesky account and that's the odd dates I was seeing, a lot of posts from their past being imported into their Bluesky account.

I didn't open this as an issue because I'm not sure how Bridgy should react to this. It seems on the Bluesky side these are just posts being added with older dates, should Bridgy have a cut-off date for bridging posts? Is this expected behaviour? As a side-effect, those profiles on the fediverse side will be posting a lot, since they are importing a whole bunch of old posts. This can impact small servers negatively (this account, for instance, it seems the import is still in 2015 and they are already around 30k posts).

Edit: Opened a bug report for the effects of this on Mastodon here, for reference

[snarfed]

Hey, sorry for the trouble! Sadly this is well-known and expected Mastodon behavior: it orders posts in your feed based on when they were received, not the actual dates of the posts themselves. mastodon/mastodon#4030, mastodon/mastodon#15912 (comment)

[renatolond]

Hey! I also opened an issue on mastodon side and it seems that's only the case if you deliver the posts through the "recently created" path of AP, see mastodon/mastodon#33747 (comment)

I made a quick fix on my server for the order of the posts, but there's still the issue that the posts are being ingested retroactively and probably are not going to be seen since they are so old.

I'm not sure it makes sense to crosspost posts that are older than a few days in any direction, wdyt?

[snarfed]

Thanks for the link, interesting to hear their explanation! AP itself doesn't have multiple different paths for delivering posts, the Create activity they mention is the only way to deliver posts in AP. Mastodon ordering feeds by delivery time instead of post time is arguably a bug on their part, or at minimum a problematic design decision.

Havins said that, it's a good suggestion, we should consider just not delivering backdated posts! I've filed #1736 for that.

[snarfed]

Done!