So I know that there are some limitations for federation, especially if you are on a smaller instance. On Mastodon I stumble upon this problem on a daily basis. Here is an example. My account is on a smaller local instance (social.cologne) and in the following picture is a post of Eugen Rochko (which I follow):
As you can see there appears to be 0 likes and 0 boosts, below are 2 conmments (not pictured). As far as I understand this is a result of federation. My instance only tracks likes and boost of my instance (and people who are followed on my instance) and as a result his post seems to be not popular at all.
Too see every interaction I would have to visit the original post on Eugens instance (https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/112574727273953783). Currently there are 6 boosts and 64 favorites on this post, with 4 replies below.
Last year I stumbled upon an android app that is able to show me the full interactions without visiting the source instance manually (https://github.com/tooot-app).
This is how I see Eugens post in my timeline
(Same as official app) and when i click on it to see the replies, the full content is shown.
I’m assuming that the app is loading the full content manually - just like if you would open the source instance.
Shouldn’t this behaviour be the default - even in the main mastodon app? If I where to only use the official app I would miss most of the interactions and content (from people my instance doesnt know about). There are other examples where you would see replies to posts that allegedly don’t exists. Only with Tooot I can see the rest of the conversation.
The tooot app didn’t see any updates for some time… Are there any other apps that show full interactions right away as well?
most apps that show “real” statistics fetch them directly from remote instance. while mastodon approach may not be too user friendly, if mastodon.social fetched remotely every post viewed by its users it would load a lot smaller instances with needless traffic.
its also not very private: you are directly connecting to each remote instance, do you trust them all? mastodon make you only ever connect to your instance, which you should trust.
lemmy servers broadcast activities across them, replicating counters. while this makes remote upvotes/downvotes show, it means federating with lemmy is pretty painful as it broadcasts a TON of activities. to provide some numbers, i started federating with 2/3 lemmy instances around half a week ago and in just that time i gathered ~100k likes (~17M) while full objects sit at ~10k (~12M)
i think a middle ground approach that may work would be to share these counters directly on the owning instance, so that fetching servers can get the current count upon fetching and only update infrequently. it doesnt even need an AP extention: by embedding the “likes” and “shares” collections there’s a “total_items” field which can be the likes count for an object. you can check, for example, this object on my instance (remove
/webfrom url to view bare json): its like count is visible directly, no need to relay each likealso another app that directly fetches statistics is fedilab