Hey @rolfbly 👋
Older posts only appear in the Author timeline after I enter their WP blog URL in the Mastodon search box. Is this expected behaviour?
When they are set to public, yes. With the next updated, posts that where not federated before and are older than one month, will be set to private by default.
Changing the post setting to Not federated, or putting it in the bin in WP, does not remove it from the timeline.
Yes, changeing the visibility does not (yet) send any delete Activities, but I think the plugin should support that. I will see how we can make that possible for a future version. The tricky part here is, if you change the visibility to private and we delete it, you can’t set it to public ever again, because deletes are irreversible.
Last week I deferated and then deleted a post in WordPress. I checked after some time, and I deleted it permanently in WP.
What so you mean by “deferated”? Have you disabled the plugin?
I imported a copy of that post into WP, defederated it, and put it in the bin. Now I have that post twice in my author account on Mastodon.
If you import the post, it will create a new post with a new ID, so it is a new Object for ActivityPub. To delete a post, you have to have the plugin enabled and put the post into the trash.
Thanks Matthias,
What so you mean by “deferated”? Have you disabled the plugin?
Sorry, typo, I meant defederated, i.e. I changed visibility from Public to Do not federate. I did not disable the plugin. So to wrap up: two posts are sitting in the WordPress bin (for about a week now), but they are still visible in the Mastodon timeline.
if you change the visibility to private and we delete it, you can’t set it to public ever again, because deletes are irreversible.
If I may side-step to more of a feature request, irreversible post deletes shouldn’t be an issue. A warning to first make a backup would suffice. I have them anyway, I write drafts in markdown.
Irreversible account deletes, yes, care should be taken.
To delete a post, you have to have the plugin enabled and put the post into the trash.
I did that, but the post(s) are still there. Is there any log I can check to see what goes on?
Anyway, I think more control over the accounts created by ActivityPub-the-plugin would be desirable. Frankly, I don’t know whether or not ActivityPub-the-protocol was designed to enable this. There a many benefits to having the extra publishing platform, but retracting publications should be possible/easier.
@rolfbly sorry for coming back late! I will add the “delete from the fediverse but not locally” as a feature request. I am not exactly sure why it hasn’t worked, because you seem to have done everything right. Maybe you can try to re-publish the post and then trash it again.
