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Written by karussell on 2025-01-14 at 16:20

Why has a post a much smaller repost count when viewed inside my home-mastodon vs their home-mastodon?

Is this a bug?

https://fosstodon.org/@zenbrowser/113628955706518243

[#]mastodon

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Written by Sven on 2025-01-14 at 16:41

@karussell no, that's normal. Your instance only counts the reposts it has seen, and that's fewer than there are overall.

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Written by Ian Wagner on 2025-01-14 at 17:19

@HeNeArXn @karussell yeah it’s not actually possible to know if your stats are global. The whole decentralized nature of Mastodon makes that impossible, so this will happen sometimes ;)

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Written by karussell on 2025-01-14 at 18:27

@ianthetechie @HeNeArXn I have no clue how decentralization works in detail (I know, that's a problem :) ), but I do not see a reason why the count couldn't be better synced. E.g. if I click on "repost" I could send this information to the home instance of the post and this information gets consumed from downstream instances along with newer posts of this instance. Likely post edits work similar and so why couldn't the repost count too :) ?

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Written by Sven on 2025-01-14 at 18:30

@karussell @ianthetechie It's a tradeoff. If you only spread the count of reposts, an instance could just lie about it and make posts look way more popular than they are. If you actually spread information about the individual reposts and have each instance verify that, its a lot more load on the overall network. (And Mastodon doesnt do anything like the latter right now, not even for replies where it would be way more useful)

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Written by karussell on 2025-01-14 at 18:35

@HeNeArXn @ianthetechie Really interesting! Of course people and instances will lie.

Maybe mastodon needs some kind of a blockchain to verify the repost count ;)

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