I just learned of an unfortunate and counterintuitive situation in which Mastodon/Hubzilla federation can fail. Details under CW. (231 words)
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I just made an unnerving discovery about a collision between the Mastodon and Hubzilla models for how conversation occurs.
I already knew that Hubzilla organizes everything as conversations, whereas Mastodon has treats each individual post/comment/reply as a top level thing in its own right. Mastodon threads federated to Hubzilla show up as conversations owned by the original post in the thread. Hubzilla conversations federated to Mastodon show up as Mastodon threads with the Hubzilla replies appearing as individual posts in the thread.
The upshot of this is that if the original post in a thread/conversation is deleted, the replies stick around on Mastodon, but (I'm pretty sure) not on Hubzilla. That's a little unsettling on both ends, but is essentially what I would expect based on my understand of how the two platforms work.
The really unnerving thing that I discovered while I was confirming all this to myself is that this also means that if the downstream Mastodon thread of a deleted post is still active, the Hubzilla participants will not be notified of continued activity, even if they are @ tagged in the continued conversation.
So, um... watch out for that?
I guess the bottom line is that if as you as a Mastodon user have tagged me as a Hubzilla user but I don't seem to have seen your message, it might be worth sending a follow-up. Ugh.
