Actor cache invalidation

[monteeya]

Hi,

I'm using a Mastodon account to test this plugin. It seems that actor info is aggressively cached on their side, is there any way to invalidate that cache?

[mediaformat]

Normally Mastodon will re-fetch the actor profile after receiving a new post.

[monteeya]

OK, thank you.

I have some ideas how it should work, but I have no idea how or even if it is supported by Mastodon.

I'm curious about this if you want to share more details.

[mediaformat]

I just tested and it worked. Have you checked your Actor json is not cached? You can use this to inspect https://json.blinry.org/#https://chaos.social/users/blinry
The other thing is that the mastodon instances you are testing on need to be following the actor.

[monteeya]

I tried it again now and it didn't work (no, actor json is not cached anywhere on my side). Maybe it depends on how the Mastodon server is configured.

[mediaformat]

On Mastodon all I could find was this mastodon/mastodon#24306

[monteeya]

Thank you, I added a comment there, but I don't know if it'll make any difference considering that the original issue has been ignored.

I'm surprised that people are okay with this, having absolutely no control over the actor cache seems like a serious issue.

[pfefferle]

I'm curious about this if you want to share more details.

In the end, a profile change could be a simple Update Activity, like for example

{
  "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
  "id": "https://wordpress.example/activity/update",
  "type": "Update",
  "actor": "https://wordpress.example/authors/name",
  "object": "https://wordpress.example/authors/name"
}

on profile changes.

[pfefferle]

Maybe we should simply implement it for the plugin and hope for adoption, to work against the hen/egg issue.

[monteeya]

I think that's a good idea, and it seems to be aligned with the ActivityPub specification. Maybe it's even supported already by some implementations.