I would like to report an absolutely absurd use of metaphor.
If you walked by 17th and Valencia on your way to lunch today, you may have noticed an enormous pile of trash steaming on the road just beyond the police station doors.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Sometimes Mastodon just... throws away the image I posted. I am 100% sure that there was an image attached to the above post via the API. And it never arrived.
I wonder if that's related to your instance being overloaded? I had all kinds of issues uploading images & videos when I was on mastodon-online, and those stopped when I switched to a smaller instance.
Presumably, but accepting the image and then discarding it forever rather than returning a 500 error or something is uh. Kwality.
A link to the image also isn't present in the RSS feed, so it's not just a web front-end issue.
I had all kinds of weird issues on .social. Images including profile icons not loading sometimes, follows not staying followed, etc...
Things got a lot better when I jumped ship to a smaller instance.
Yeah, I know that doesn't bode well for the scalability of this platform long term, but that's just my experience.
similar. That’s why I moved too.
yeah, I think it’s a service thing. The API craps out and the upload to S3 either doesn’t complete or the S3 URL doesn’t get stored. Some breakage in the chain.
I would love to have access to error logs.
This, maybe?
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/22124
probably unwanted advice, BUT if you setup your own personal mastodon instance you'd probably find the experience to be night and day. I'm just using a host and the difference has been absurd.
If there was an easy, low-resource, secure way to run my own instance I would. There is not. (Anyone who claims there is has a different understanding of some or all of those words than I do.)
yeah this is fair (and also why I just paid for a host, at least I have someone to yell at). But the flipside is I just don't trust any of the big mastodon hosts *more* than a host I am literally paying for a service.
I think one big "Mastodon" problem is the variety of client options plus any disparity of server versions between instances (plusplus related ActivityPug protocol support level) plus the variation in backend stores for images/caching/etc.
That means knowing *why* images just vanish on you could have an unending, nigh-endless count of possible answers.
Single points of failure are bad, of course, but I would offer that so are infinity points of failure? Just for different reasons.
I dunno, my strong hunch is that there's not as much diversity in this ecosystem as you might think. I suspect two things are true:
- The vast majority of ActivityPub end-users are connecting to the same piece of software (mainline unforked Mastodon, +/- a couple version revs)
- That particular software is... not great.
Fwiw, I got the image just fine. They do tend to show up sporadically in general, though, and sometimes take me a reload to see them. I'm on sfba.social, if that helps.
Still not showing up for me. I am speaking of the "Garbage Fire" post.
Oh, yeah, threading error on my part. I didn't see the garbage fire picture, I saw the Chappelle one next to your comment. Never mind.
This happens an unacceptable amount of times, its frustrating
I've seen this in my timeline a few times now. Sometimes the image appears minutes/hours later? But especially today I've seen several people saying "there was supposed to be an image there".
i’ve had alt text go MIA also
This happened to me once.
Twice.
This just happened again. My latest post has no image: https://mastodon.social/@jwz/109543246221682639 The JSON also shows no "media_attachments": https://mastodon.social/api/v1/statuses/109543246221682639
But at the time my app made this post, it had already uploaded an image, received a media ID for it, *and* verified that the same ID was present in "media_attachments" property returned by the successful post to the /statuses endpoint.
So the Mastodon server returned a post object that had "media_attachments" and then later just... threw them away?
FYI, when I click on that post link, and then click on the link to jwz.org, I get a timeout. Maybe Mastodon is also getting a timeout?
No. I *uploaded image data*, not a URL. It accepted that data, gave me a receipt for it, twice, and then silently threw it away.
Ah. I misunderstood. Sorry!
During high volume times I’ve seen this a lot.
That's my guess. .social says they have 201k users, and they probably weren't scaled up for it.
Looks like a question for @Gargron
Maybe it's some load-balancing artifact.
That's pretty odd. I've taken a look at the posting code recently, and posting the status and associating media attachments with it is pretty much the one thing that is wrapped in a transaction and so I would expect to be atomic. Everything else is in separate transactions, or queuing async processes, so I'd expect no atomicity, but associating media attachments with a post is like the single thing that I would expect to be atomic if the post actually works.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/c1de6730604f526a6c2d19adcf6f195352de0641/app/services/post_status_service.rb#L65-L72
I mean, this is Rails, and there's way too much magic, so I could be missing something. In general, I'd expect everything with Mastodon to be "best effort"; posting is very much not an atomic operation, and it's possible for it to be partially completed, but it looks like there was actually effort to wrap a transaction around associating the media with the post.
Thanks for the warning. Just about to start a bot that posts images. Let us all know if you figure out how to make this all more reliable.
Note the careful use of "beyond the doors" rather than "outside the doors".
C.
Could you explain the nuance to a speaker of British English?
I think the idea is that "beyond" could also imply "inside", but the rest of the sentence negates that reading.
interesting, usually the trash is inside the police station