Updated post (already published) published to activity feed

[jeckman]

Quick summary

Editing an old post (previously published - in this case ~5 years ago) causes it to be "published" again to activitypub followers.

Not certain what the Activity Pub protocol says about edits to previously published posts - maybe this is because this post was not published to ActivityPub?

Either way I'd think the user expectation is that minor changes to an old post (which does not change its publish date) would not result in it being sent to existing feed subscribers / followers.

Steps to reproduce

Edit an old post / update some content in it.

View your activity feed externally (in my case I keep a Mastodon account that follows my WordPress blog for testing).

Site owner impact

Fewer than 20% of the total website/platform users

Severity

Minor

What other impact(s) does this issue have?

No response

If a workaround is available, please outline it here.

No response

[pfefferle]

The problem is, that we can't say for sure when something is a "minor change" or not. Sometimes is a simple "not" or the removal of a "not" a fundamental change. To give everyone that liked or shared the post the possibility to re-check if they still agree with your post, we have to send updates.

Btw. For older posts that were not federated before, the settings default to "Do not federate".

[jeckman]

Thanks Matthias - will check the settings - perhaps I had changed that setting unintentionally?

I could see some kind of checkbox for choosing to federate or not, or a decision based on whether the publish date changed?

Maybe that makes this not a bug but a feature request

[jeckman]

Where is that setting? I don't see it anywhere

[pfefferle]

In the sidebar of the post-editor.

[jeckman]

Ah, I see - so the user can set the post to "Do not federate" when making an update to an older post? I'll close this as I no longer see this as a bug

[jeckman]

Actually, I think there is a bug here - even if the post's meta (in the sidebar) is set to "Do not federate" clicking save on an update to an old post does pop it into the feed.

To replicate, I edited a very old post that was never federated, ensured the "Visibility" was set to "Do Not Federate" and hit save (also had "Don't Updat the modified date" checked FWIW) - and it immediately showed at the top of the feed (I subscribe through Mastodon to my own WP instance for troubleshooting).

So it seems that setting is not working - after that I was able to save the post again (with no changes) and set "Do Not Federate" back to the right default.

[kaffeeringe]

Btw. For older posts that were not federated before, the settings default to "Do not federate".

That didn't work for me. I changed some older posts and I got notified about the new post. Is that only because I activated the notification? But the option is not set to "do not federate".

[pfefferle]

@jeckman was that specific post published to the fediverse before?

@kaffeeringe can you elaborate on this? what do you mean by notification and have you set "do not federate" or not?

[kaffeeringe]

I clicked "the bell" at @blog@kaffeeringe.de so I get notified about my new blog posts (so I can boost them with my Mastodon account).

I changed an old articles from 2014. I didn't actively set "Do not federate".

I got notified about the changed article on Mastodon.