This past June, I put together a write-up about two major approaches to backfilling conversations. The ability to properly backfill conversations means we will be able to make major inroads toward solving the feeling that the fediverse is quiet.

I, alongside several other members of the SWICG Forums and Threaded Discussions Task Force (ForumWG) have been working toward building implementor support for Conversational Contexts — the ability to explicitly classify a set of objects as belonging to a conversation, whether that be a topic, reply tree, or similar.

I am happy to report that we have made some wonderful inroads this past few months!

jesseplusplus@mastodon.social has been working closely with the Mastodon team to allow software to backfill from Mastodon — this pull request has now been approved!

I have been working with both nutomic@lemmy.ml and rimu@piefed.social to allow software to backfill from Lemmy and Piefed, respectively. (Lemmy PR, Piefed issue)

This marks a major milestone in the adoption of conversational contexts. With Mastodon on board backfill will be possible with the majority of the microblogiverse. With Lemmy and Piefed on board, backfill will be possible with the majority of the threadiverse.

Remember that pfefferle@mastodon.social was an early adopter of conversational contexts, and we have been able to backfill from WordPress blogs for quite awhile now (so that's the blogiverse too)

I for one, am eagerly awaiting the next version of all of these softwares!!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 35 points 3 weeks ago (15 children)

Can anyone ELI15 what backfilling conversations means?

[–] wakest@piefed.social 50 points 3 weeks ago (13 children)

Sometimes you see a post on your home instance and it looks like it has no replies but then you go look at it on the remote view and there are lots of replies. Backfilling is like making sure if you see a post it has all the comments

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

What's "the remote view"? Never seen that feature in any Lemmy app before. But if it means more comments on Lemmy, I'm all for it.

[–] Natanael 2 points 3 weeks ago

The post you replied to comes from a different instance than your own, so does my answer. When you're logging into your instance, the view of their and mine posts are both remote to you.

Sometimes in Mastodon you'll only see the specific post that you're opening a link to directly, not other posts before or after. This tries to fix that.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (11 replies)

load more comments (12 replies)