Backfill inbox [#3315832]

Problem/Motivation

Despite activitypub specification doesn't mention backfill, and activitypub is taken as mail inbox/outbox, which cannot receive messages before they are created. There are reasons to implement, first of all the silos comparation, it's a common practice among them that when you start following someone its previous messages appear in your timeline.

I think most of the users are expecting it.

To collect some conversations/ideas about it:
- Mastodon: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34
- Pixelfed: https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/issues/1745
- Friendica: backfills pinned statuses

Implementation

There's a setting on the settings screen in the 'Inbox' group where you can toggle the functionality and set the amount of activities to backfill. This is handled by StaticTypes::onActivityPostSave and StaticTypes::doInboxProcess. There's no manual button so far, that can maybe be handled in the UI of the reader module, but we'll see. Other clients don't seem to have this, as far as I can see anyway. Could be an ideal candidate for #3574479: Create a pluggable transport manager too (the doInboxProcess part then)

Issue fork activitypub-3315832

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Comments

Comment #1

17 October 2022 at 20:50

aleix created an issue. See original summary.

Comment #2

swentel commented 20 October 2022 at 19:13

I like the idea. I can imagine a setting for the amount to get fetch; If 0, nothing comes in. Maybe limit the UI to say maximum 30 or so? (otherwise, we'd have to iterate all pages in the outbox too)

Comment #3

aleix

Catalan

Terrassa

commented 29 October 2022 at 20:58

Good, that would be great. Maybe it could start with a little amount of 10 (or the number set manually in settings) and a manual button to obtain more activities afterwards.

Comment #4

swentel commented 16 April 2026 at 14:26

Assigned:	Unassigned	» swentel
Category:	Feature request	» Task

This is becoming interesting for the API implementation too. I have a test in the api where a user follows another one, and then I expected to see the posts, which are created before in the test, are appearing, but they aren't available for the timeline items yet.

Setting as task, but not necessarily as a dependency to finish the API, but will move it to the 'other' section to get this in for 1.0.0