Warn when user tries to access timelines that we know to be disabled in the server config

[pdeitel]

@halcy Thanks for updating the library today. I installed the 2.2.1 update and tried to build a simple streaming app. It does not give errors as it used to, but I am not getting any posts from the stream_public stream.

To try to debug it, I overrode

def _dispatch(self, event):

to print the event objects so I could see what is going on, and I am getting only:

{'event': 'delete', 'data': '114534539695375765'}
{'event': 'delete', 'data': '114534543856622891'}
{'event': 'delete', 'data': '116392308845328413'}
{'event': 'delete', 'data': '114324199157173495'}
{'event': 'delete', 'data': '116352683153907252'}
...

I also tried stream_hashtag and for that I am getting only:

{}
{}
{}
...

I did not try the other streams.

Paul

[halcy]

Well, that is strange and slightly worrying. Could you share a snippet that causes this to happen, and your python version?

[halcy]

Hm. Actually, this may be expected behaviour - I think mastodon.social just doesn't provide a public federated timeline anymore. For some reason it does still throw delete events into that timelines stream, which is a bit weird and I am not sure if that is intentional or an accident. If you try on another instance, you will still get data as intended. as for the hashtag timeline - try posting something to that hashtag, the status will show up. or you can try stream_user to get the home timeline stream, that will work as intended.

[pdeitel]

Interesting. I thought the federated timeline was posts coming from ALL mastodon instances in the federated network.

Thanks for checking!

[halcy]

It is, but it is disabled on mastodon.social (and maybe some other big servers) specifically , so if you’re running the api calls against that server, you get nothing (or, well, just delete events, for some reason). If you run against some other server you will get all the posts from the network that that server can see.

[pdeitel]

So interesting. Wonder why they changed it. Oh well...

[halcy]

https://mastodon.social/@staff/115849914607258480 the reasoning given

anyways, assuming stream_user works for you, I'd like to close this, since it is working as intended.

[pdeitel]

yes, please do. Thanks for the quick follow thru.

[halcy]

Checked with Mastodon dev team, the stream not erroring is on purpose, DELETE events maybe not. I will make a note in the docs and maybe start emitting a warning if these endpoints are used on .social / .online, since they're big servers and this could get people confused who are playing around exploring the API.

[halcy]

Or better yet - this is exposed in instance config info, so we can emit a warning based on that.