How is following really working?

Mobilizon
1

This happened today:

  1. I get an Mobilizon email, saying: Want to connect? Events relevant for S/Y Solveig or its captain (solveig.plann.no)
  2. I click on the “View details” in the email.
  3. On Admin > Instances > solveig.plann.no it says: “This instance doesn’t follow yours.”
  4. I visit Events relevant for S/Y Solveig or its captain - Mobilizon and see 6 groups (out of 16) from my site.

So, there is some following going on, but nothing I can control. Is the following for each separate group, maybe? I don’t have any problems with solveig.plann.no following. I just want to know what’s going on. Maybe I did get a following request, but when I opened the email, they had changed their mind.

2

Now, when we actually follow each other:

I also tried to run:

sudo -u mobilizon ./bin/mobilizon_ctl relay.refresh solveig.plann.no

3

Great to discover these instances!

I noticed their event is “tentative”, maybe that’s why it’s not federated.

One reason why you might see only one group could be that the other has been created before you start follow this instance. I’m not 100% sure, but I think if you follow the group from your instance then it would appear (if you do so, I’d appreciate a feedback).

And I’m curious about the mail you received, was it a mobilizon generated email? Or maybe Solveig tried to get in touch with you, asking you to follow them?

4

solveig is my instance. I’m completely new to this and also quite bewildered on how “following” actually works :slight_smile:

5

Nice to meet you!

I’m part of Mobilizon maintenance team and we are working on this right now: make “following” more clear an improve it.

We’ll release an improved version in january, and there will be more to come later in the year. But in short if you want events from your instance to be shown on other instance, right now you have to ask instance administrator to make a “follow request”.

6

I noticed their event is “tentative”, maybe that’s why it’s not federated.

I thought of that as well, but the other instance I follow, events.hackeriet.no, also has tentative events that federate just fine (like DemoHack (TBA) - Mobilizon )

One reason why you might see only one group could be that the other has been created before you start follow this instance. I’m not 100% sure, but I think if you follow the group from your instance then it would appear (if you do so, I’d appreciate a feedback).

Both groups existed before I started to follow the instance. The same was the case for the other instance I follow, events.hackeriet.no, and all groups appeared from them. One interesting sidenote, though:

The reason I became aware of events.hackeriet.no, was that some groups from that instance suddenly appeared on my instance. It was only after that I started following the instance. That sound a lot like what happened here when groups from gjer.no appeared on solveig.plann.no without following (or at least that’s how it appeared to me – maybe @tobixen(Hi! by the way) can elaborate.

And I’m curious about the mail you received, was it a mobilizon generated email? Or maybe Solveig tried to get in touch with you, asking you to follow them

Yes, it was a Mobilizon generated email: “Want to connect? Events relevant for S/Y Solveig or its captain (solveig.plann.no) just requested to follow your instance. If you accept, this instance will receive all of your public events. [..]”

When I clicked the link and saw no following request on Admin →Instances, I thought maybe the request was removed. But still, some groups appeared on the site.

Anyway, the whole federation affair seems a bit messy and hard to control and understand, so I’m looking forward to some improvements.

1 Like
7

So weird…

I created an issue in the git, we’ll try to dive in.

1 Like
8

There is the filter for “this instance only” and “my network“. I want to create some sites that by default show what may be relevant and nothing else, so I added a third option “this and followed instances” in my fork. Right at the moment I have only one event on my sites, but I expect to populate both instances with more events towards the end of the week.

9

Sorry, I cannot elaborate on that. I hope to get more control on things up over the next few weeks.

10

I thought it was a feature (“my network” being not only the instances I’m following directly but also the instances followed by the instances I’m following), not a bug. As mentioned above I made a workaround in my fork. If the “extended network” is a bug and not a feature, I should certainly revert my workaround :slight_smile: