Rich Media parsing was previously handled on-demand with a 2 second HTTP request timeout and retained only in Cachex. Every time a Pleroma instance is restarted it will have to request and parse the data for each status with a URL detected. When fetching a batch of statuses they were processed in parallel to attempt to keep the maximum latency at 2 seconds, but often resulted in a timeline appearing to hang during loading due to a URL that could not be successfully reached. URLs which had images links that expire (Amazon AWS) were parsed and inserted with a TTL to ensure the image link would not break.
Rich Media data is now cached in the database and fetched asynchronously. Cachex is used as a read-through cache. When the data becomes available we stream an update to the clients. If the result is returned quickly the experience is almost seamless. Activities were already processed for their Rich Media data during ingestion to warm the cache, so users should not normally encounter the asynchronous loading of the Rich Media data.
Implementation notes:
- The async worker is a Task with a globally unique process name to prevent duplicate processing of the same URL
- The Task will attempt to fetch the data 3 times with increasing sleep time between attempts
- The HTTP request obeys the default HTTP request timeout value instead of 2 seconds
- URLs that cannot be successfully parsed due to an unexpected error receives a negative cache entry for 15 minutes
- URLs that fail with an expected error will receive a negative cache with no TTL
- Activities that have no detected URLs insert a nil value in the Cachex :scrubber_cache so we do not repeat parsing the object content with Floki every time the activity is rendered
- Expiring image URLs are handled with an Oban job
- There is no automatic cleanup of the Rich Media data in the database, but it is safe to delete at any time
- The post draft/preview feature makes the URL processing synchronous so the rendered post preview will have an accurate rendering
Overall performance of timelines and creating new posts which contain URLs is greatly improved.
We were overzealous with matching on a raw error from the object fetch that should have never been relied on like this. If we can't fetch successfully we should assume that the collection is private.
Building a more expressive and universal error struct to match on may be something to consider.
Since we always followed redirects (and until recently allowed fuzzy id
matches), the ap_id of the received object might differ from the iniital
fetch url. This lead to us mistakenly trying to insert a new user with
the same nickname, ap_id, etc as an existing user (which will fail due
to uniqueness constraints) instead of updating the existing one.
In order to properly process incoming notes we need
to be able to map the key id back to an actor.
Also, check collections actually belong to the same server.
Key ids of Hubzilla and Bridgy samples were updated to what
modern versions of those output. If anything still uses the
old format, we would not be able to verify their posts anyway.
Currently our own frontend doesn’t show backgrounds of other users, this
property is already publicly readable via REST API and likely was always
intended to be shown and federated.
Recently Sharkey added support for profile backgrounds and
immediately made them federate and be displayed to others.
We use the same AP field as Sharkey here which should make
it interoperable both ways out-of-the-box.
Ref.: 4e64397635
Only real change here is making MRF rejects log as debug instead of info (https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma/issues/234)
I don't know if it's the best way to do it, but it seems it's just MRF using this and almost always this is intended.
The rest are just minor docs changes and syncing the restricted nicknames stuff.
I compiled and ran my changes with Docker and they all work.
Co-authored-by: r3g_5z <june@terezi.dev>
Reviewed-on: https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma/pulls/313
Co-authored-by: @r3g_5z@plem.sapphic.site <june@girlboss.ceo>
Co-committed-by: @r3g_5z@plem.sapphic.site <june@girlboss.ceo>
