So! Did you notice old conversations/favorites/bookmarks being "broken" here after a while, if they involve people from other instances? Turns out there was a Mastodon setting that, kinda, "breaks them by design", and it was set to "plz break conversations after 14 days" on this instance. Now that's fixed and 🤞 it should be better from now on. I might have accidentally set that setting myself without realizing the implications, sorry!
@aras If it can be rebuilt by walkimg the entire history of the instance and rebuilding it, it is a cache. But in that case there should be a button right next to it to rebuild the cache.
@maxholl@aras it can't. if the thread originates on the instance the purges posts within the thread that come from other instances, you can no longer reconstruct the conversation, as the references to the external posts are simply gone.
if you are lucky anothet "participating" instance has a version of the entire conversation. but you can not recover it from their either without adding that as a new feature. it is also likely to be incomplete.
@aras How irreversible was the change? Are these conversations and bookmarks going to come back? Just the bookmarks? Or was everything "helpfully" cleared by this lovingly labeled feature?
@aras the design is bizarre: the references in local toots are modified instead of just dropping the foreign toots from local cache and re-fetching them if needed again. That would be a conventional cache.
(remember when I timidly attempted to ask you about this, before irritated people started throwing around heated epithets?)
@aras I used to work on an iOS app that stored all its data in the cache directory, which, per spec, can be wiped by the OS at any moment. I screamed about it a few times but kept getting the answer "we've always done it this way and it never caused any problems, so we're not changing it" 🤦♂️
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