When a community is not yet federated on the instance (or post is from before federation) enabling notifications for it makes backfilling of past posts trigger notifications too
I don’t have an opinion if this is wrong per se but I think I’ve discovered an edge case that I decided to share

Scenario 1:

  1. I discover some communities on another instance that my instance doesn’t know of yet
  2. I open my feeds and add them to a feed that has notifications enabled
  3. at this point communities are empty, backfilling of IIRC 50 last posts will happen soon
  4. wait a bit
  5. suddenly my notifications get drowned in past posts

Scenario 2:

  1. I have a community that has notifications on, either directly or via a feed
  2. out of the blue I get notification about some old post. Not a comment inside, the post itself. As if it was just posted. But all the dates inside are in the “far” past

I guess what happened in scenario 2 is that someone did “retrieve remote post”

Logically it makes sense but I guess it might be disorienting to some from pure UX perspective. I know of backfill and it does serve the purpose of showing that federation for community is working. But TBH what I expected was to start getting notified on new posts, not the old ones

On one hand, to me, addressing that feels like going after Pareto hard
On another, when someone migrates to a newly set up instance, that will be the behaviour of notifications

  • wjs018@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    4 months ago

    I agree that would be the hard part of what I proposed; controlling what posts send notifications to activity alert subscriptions vs. not. To get a bit technical, we would have to add an option to the post creation flow where we specify whether this post should trigger activity alert notifications or not. When it is being created as part of a backfill for a newly federated community it would not send notifications, otherwise, the default behavior is that it does (what happens now). I haven’t looked at the code yet to see how difficult this might be to do, but that is the high level of what would need to happen.

    As for potential new notifications about communities being added/removed, that is much more straightforward.