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@julian As an aside, I often use the @Fedilab@piaille.fr client for Mastodon. It has a fetch-all-replies button that usually works pretty well for Mastodon, and sometimes for other servers. If you copy that approach, it would pretty much fix my issue. But I have to admit I have only user-level understanding of ActivityPub, you might be working on something much better.

@julian Great to see you working on it! My primary use case would be reading from Mastodon, any level of automatic retrieval would be an improvement.

I can see why you're excited about the new federation features, but whoa did you create a lot of work for yourself

As you can see, mentions are pretty good at getting messages delivered both ways. The problem is getting messages that aren't replies to "real" forum posts. Try moving a big thread from somewhere on mastodon into a subforums and see what happens.

I really enjoy the federation feature very much, we move a lot of interesting fediverse threads into the forum and also have people from "outside" replying to threads.

Doing this, I've come across a UX issue (well, two) when moving in threads into the forum:

1. I spot a thread somewhere in fedi that I want in the forum
2. I paste the URL of a post from the thread into the nodeBB search bar
3. I click "show results as topics"
4. I find only that post and anything upthread from it
5. I move that thread into the forum
6. To get all the subthreads into the forum, I gather all the URLs of the leaves of the thread, search for them (as topics) and they federate in
7. Any future replies are not federated, unless they @ a forum user og any forum user follows the person replying (and even then maybe not, Fedi is Mysterious)

I would like:

1. A fetch-all-replies button to push after point 4) above, to get the whole thread from the original instance.
2. An automated reply-fetcher polling for new replies in the original thread (w. exponential back-off etc.)

Maybe this already exists or is raised somewhere else? If so, feel free to move my post or just give me a reference.

Thanks for this really excellent piece of software