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!

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 [email protected] 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!!

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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    23 hours ago

    AFAIK, It’s to solve or mitigate the “Replies from other servers may be missing” issue.

    Essentially imagine you are signed in on server A, responding to or looking at a comment from server B. But people on servers C, D and E have faved, boosted or replied to that same comment. Unless you or someone on your server had followed people on the other servers, you can’t see those comments or their contributions to the boost count, unless you go to view the comment on server B’s site.

    Backfilling means server A fetching those other actions from other servers somehow, so that they will show up when you view it from your own server reliably. Examples of that somehow could be, obtaining all the info from server B (localized single source of truth), it could be collected individually from other servers, from a centralized server, or other means.