I gather that it had a use unrelated to Lemmy but for Lemmy posts I make a case here that it is more misleading than helpful. For a moment, please ignore the underlying reasons why things are the way they are and focus on how the issue presents to the end-users.
(1) By pulling in solely the post, but not any of the comments, it at best provides only partial information - which if all you wanted to read was the post, then why bother pulling it here at all? (as opposed to retrieving from its original location - I mean, to do it you already need the full URL…) While if instead you wanted all of the comments… - e.g. to be able to reply to - then too bad, b/c it won’t do that?
(2) It also does not pull in any of the old vote counts. So if hypothetically a post had 1000 upvotes, and then after pulling it here it received adjustments +2 from upvotes and -4 from downvotes, then its total would then be 998, right? Except PieFed would instead display “-2”, a qualitatively different score for a highly popular post that is a terrible misrepresentation of the actual facts about it.
(3) It conveys a distorted view of things to the end-users. e.g. see [email protected] where there are 6 posts from the last 2 months, right? Right?! No, there is actually only a single post there in its entirety, then a few more that I and what I assume was Blaze pulled in - note how those other 5 have zero comments, and total scores near zero, due to the aforementioned issues. Really the “earliest” post that PieFed.social reliably has from that community is from 4 days ago, and then beyond that is a scattered, partial mess. There are actually MANY more posts from the last two months, which are not represented here. Ergo, the initial impression that a quick glance at this community offers turns out to be false, due to these federation issues.
(4) showing only partial information is often called a “false positive” or type I style of error, whereas showing nothing at all for those posts that are not fully here avoids that pitfall. If certain content is not here then… well it is not here, and that’s that, but for only some of it to be here leads to much confusion, imho.
Almost entirely distinct from this issue, the ability to find an existing post given its URL should be added to the search menu, b/c that is where people will go to find it. But ofc all the more so if the retrieval button is removed or made less prominent, so that that find ability is not lost along with that.
I understand that there are hard limitations of the federated model itself. So if e.g. older comments and votes cannot retroactively be pulled in - or possibly even if so - then maybe this function should just be abolished? Or perhaps a couple more layers of “are you sure you want to do this?” added, or better yet moving it from its prominent place showing up to everyone on almost every page to a more subdued location where only those who know what it is and what will happen if it is used are likely to access it? I now feel that I actively made the situation in [email protected] worse by pulling in those posts, and wished now that I hadn’t done so, as it could lead people astray into thinking “this is all the posts that the community has to offer from this time-period” (NO, it actually has MANY MANY more than that, on the original server!?!!). Now that I know this I can refrain from using it, but it would be nice to help others who climb this ladder after me as well:-). So I am sharing my thoughts with you in case that helps.
PieFed is freaking awesome and you all who work on it are magnificently extraordinary to share your knowledge with the world:-).
Part 1 of 2.
In the past I have used the rainbow-colored Fediverse icon for things like a quick short-cut to the original instance, to check things like the community or instance rules, but mostly ever since Lemmy started being able to read the static.wikia types of images, I haven’t needed it anymore, now that all instances display more or less identical content for a given post.
With the exception of that known Lemmy.World federation issue. What happened there, from what I hear, is that the Fediverse was never meant to have a singular server holding 80% of the entire userbase, and to have every community be joined by someone on every instance (which Blaze has been doing with his army of alts, to aid newcomers who couldn’t figure out how to join a community that nobody else on the instance had already joined yet). Read more here: https://aussie.zone/post/13429731 (github issue linked from there). TLDR: the issue is already solved (probably) but is in the 0.19.6 version, which Lemmy.ml is testing but until Lemmy.World upgrades to it this issue will continue. I’ve seen it happen on piefed.social, but also startrek.website, discuss.online, and other servers as well.
But in general, I was not asking to be able to view every single post from its original server (though again, that would be somewhat useful, occasionally), nor even being able to pull in a post when it is not there, but to make the pulling in of a post be either full or else none. Here is a simple mathematical equation that may perhaps help: 1 + 1 = 2 is true, and 1 + 1 = ? could also be true, but 1 + 1 = 1 is not. The first one is fully and precisely true, the second is vague and unsatisfying that someone doesn’t know the answer… but at least it is still technically correct. Whereas the third answer is just flat false.
It sounds like from what you and others are saying that it is literally impossible to be able to get the answer of “2” via the current methods of Federation. Okay then, well that seems to inform our answer: if we absolutely cannot get the proper answer of “2”, then we should put “?”, but in no case should we (imho at least) show “1”, just b/c after we pull in a post it receives +1 upvote. “x+1=1” is invalid for nearly all values of x, except the one that happens to be true, and yet ALL of the others are false, hence we should not shorten x+1 to merely say “1” as if 1 + 1 = 1 were a correct statement.
Alternatively, which depending on interrelation with other reasons might be the better way even, perhaps we should simply disallow the pulling in of posts altogether - if they cannot be done “properly” then perhaps to avoid misleading aka false statements, it should not be done at all?
Still further alternatives could be to (1) pull in “ghost” or “shortcut” versions of the post, which are displayed VERY noticably different than “real” ones, and which when clicked go to the original server, and which also have something like “?” or “n/a” rather than a vote count; or (2) similar to 1 but which when clicked show all of the comments, those having been pulled in via some other means (API?) but there too the vote count(s?) should not be displayed, unless they are known to be accurate.
Other matters also interrelate with the above though. e.g. I notice that piefed.social has defederated from hexbear.net (https://piefed.social/instance/hexbear.net does not resolve and https://piefed.social/instances?search=hex&submit=Search looks empty) - so if any votes can from that instance, those should not be counted. Web scraping would include them though, and others e.g. those from people who piefed.social (or any PieFed instance, just picking on that one:-) has banned. Perhaps this is a minor point, but it does touch on how those vote counts are interrelated to other matters, which if brought in via “alternative” means will make it harder to figure out what to display for them. And… oops, I see that you already got to the reverse of that point, where Beehaw would add vote counts, beyond what e.g. web scraping would be able to pick up. Well, nothing is fully perfect, but I did want to suggest that we avoid any KNOWN sources of misinformation. Some corner cases like that… can be saved for perhaps another day when further developing this ActivityPub implementation makes more sense, compared to other more urgent things that need to be worked on in the meantime. i.e., especially if something is also a problem for Lemmy, then it seems understandable to me that if it is likewise a problem for PieFed, then there is little “expectation” that we would do better than them, in every single possible way?
Damn, I’ve hit a space limit.