AFAIK, It’s to solve or mitigate the “Replies from other servers may be missing” issue.
Essentially imagine you are signed in on server A, responding to or looking at a comment from server B. But people on servers C, D and E have faved, boosted or replied to that same comment. Unless you or someone on your server had followed people on the other servers, you can’t see those comments or their contributions to the boost count, unless you go to view the comment on server B’s site.
Backfilling means server A fetching those other actions from other servers somehow, so that they will show up when you view it from your own server reliably. Examples of that somehow could be, obtaining all the info from server B (localized single source of truth), it could be collected individually from other servers, from a centralized server, or other means.
wakest@piefed.social 5 days ago
Sometimes you see a post on your home instance and it looks like it has no replies but then you go look at it on the remote view and there are lots of replies. Backfilling is like making sure if you see a post it has all the comments
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
I don’t use mastodon, but is that an issue for the Threadiverse? I thought all replies are collected by the host instance of the community.
dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 5 days ago
It may still be missing stuff from before the first person from your home instance joined the community which can make younger communities feel empty.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Ah ok. That’s the problem that the major instances solved by having bots auto join all new communities in each other, right?
julian@activitypub.space 5 days ago
You're not wrong about that. Threadiverse software (Lemmy, Piefed, and NodeBB too) use something called 1b12 to synchronize content between instances.
If you follow a community, you set up the synchronization from your server to that community.
This is similar, but about backfill, which is what happens if you follow a community mid-way and don't have any of that stuff from before.
Also you can't 1b12 synchronize with Mastodon, so that unfortunately is a dead-end, but you would hopefully be able to backfill from Mastodon.
wakest@piefed.social 5 days ago
everything is weaved together! What happenes when a mastodon account responds to a piefed account and then that gets shared by a Friendica account etc.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
I have no idea :)
Psythik@lemmy.world 4 days ago
What’s “the remote view”? Never seen that feature in any Lemmy app before.
Natanael@infosec.pub 4 days ago
The post you replied to comes from a different instance than your own, so does my answer. When you’re logging into your instance, the view of their and mine posts are both remote to you.
Sometimes in Mastodon you’ll only see the specific post that you’re opening a link to directly, not other posts before or after. This tries to fix that.
pwalker@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days ago
Well you have your “home” lemmy instance whicj you are logged in to. Everything you see goes through you home instance. But many thing you will see originate on a completely different “remote” instance. Your home instamce nees to be federated and synced in order to the everything that happens in the remote/origin instance