TheVoidTLMB

Thanks for the fix! I think I will get by okay until the next update. 🙂

Ah, I suspect a link to…

8.0.2 – 2026-03-17 Security

• Prevent non-public posts (drafts, scheduled, pending review) from being accessible via ActivityPub.

Confirmed as now working in v8.0, thanks! But the poster image doesn’t show in the WP editor’s “Fediverse preview”. Is that (current) expected behaviour, @pfefferle ?

Hmm, actually I wonder if this is to do with the video’s frame rate being 50fps, which is too high for (some?) Mastodon servers’ liking. I’ve just edited https://tlmb.net/blog/winter-sun-kendama-trilogy/ to add a poster image to the first video there, which is 29.97fps, but that poster image doesn’t seem to have federated (…yet?) either. It’s using my WP blog’s AP account icon as the poster frame.

TL;DR With some help from my host’s support team, I got my last (large) archive fully imported successfully! But I think there are still two issues remaining.
—–
For the benefit of anyone who might stumble across this (and @obenland if he’s not sick of hearing from me already 😉 ), I’ll summarise the issues I came up against along the way.

(BTW all of this was done with the thread-supporting dev version of AP 7.7.0)

First, my archive was larger than my WP’s upload size limit (540MB vs 512MB), so I used this method to find the two largest mp4s in my archive, remove them, and re-zipped it, which gave me a 501MB archive file. (My plan was to later re-add those two files to my Media Library, and re-attach them by editing their parent posts in the WP admin area, after the import had run.)

Next, I kept getting Internal Server Error at the end of the upload – which means I didn’t even get to the point of clicking the “Import” button.

After various back-and-forth emails to the Support team, they identified two issues:
i. My shared server hosting needed beefing up. They kindly adjusted some php values for me. (Possibly their ModSecurity (Web Application Firewall) was causing an issue, but I think we later ruled that out.)
ii. My WordPress database was encoded in the older utf8mb3_general_ci format , and needed to be updated to utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci .

After dealing with those, the importer ran, and imported some posts, but no media, and returned an error of
“Sorry, there has been an error.
Content, title, and excerpt are empty.”
Between us, we managed to work out that ONE single post in my archive had no post text, just an image attached, and this was causing the error.
I searched in the outbox.json file, and found one instance of…
"content":""
..and change it to…
"content":"<p>Post has no text content</p>"
…(or any other text would work) , saved, and rezipped it all up and tried again.

This time, all the posts were imported. But still no media. So it seemed that my workaround method for reducing the file size was stopping the media from being imported. Support increased my limits for me I tried with my full 540MB file. But still no media were imported.

I resigned myself to having to upload them to the media library manually, and re-attaching each one to its parent post, one by one. A few a day would get me there eventually, but it would be tedious.

But next day I got another email from Support, who had noticed something about the file paths in outbox.json. They all had an extra string at the start of the attachment urls. I am an idiot! This was the same problem @obenland found before in this post.

Okay, not exactly the same… I had assumed the mention of the older version of Mastodon in that archive was the problem, and mentally written it off as the cause. This time though, the attachment paths didn’t have the
/v1/AUTH_011…[etc].
string at the start, but did have just
/mothsocial/media_attachments/files/110/…[etc]…6a25.jpeg
So I did a find-and-replace-all of…
"url":"/mothsocial/
to
"url":"/
… tried again (having erased all previously imported posts, and emptied the trash, just for good measure), and…
SUCCESS! All posts imported, and all media imported and attached to their parent posts. Yay!

So, it looks like this server-name-at-the-start-of-the-attachment-file-path is still an issue in Mastodon v4.[whichever version moth social was running in Dec 2024].

Last thing. Now it seemed like it wasn’t my file-size reduction workaround that was the problem after all. To check that, I fixed the empty post and the URL prefix error in a copy of my archive, removed all the mp4s and zipped it up to give me a 130MB archive file. In my test environment, I uploaded and imported this file with AP 7.8.2, and…
“Imported 1,679 posts.
Imported 353 comments from self-reply threads.
All done. Have fun!”
….and all my image media files were imported too. So my workaround to shrink a oversize archive does work after all!

However, with this 7.8.2 import, none of the posts from other people that I had replied to were embedded – every one is just displayed as a link. This had worked okay with the dev version of 7.7.0 that I used on my main site.

Hope that’s all useful to someone!
Much thanks to my host’s Support team, and to Obenland again.

This appears to have been a glitch. I have since successfully mentioned a bridged bluesky user on the original WP set-up, getting a linked @ name, and federation of the comment. Marking it as Resolved. Thanks.

Retested an import of my archive #4 in my test environment (with the thread-supporting version of AP you sent me, @obenland ), and the post there with an image was included at full size.
So then I ran the import of #4 on my live site (AP 7.7.1), and that post again has a non-clickable thumbnail embed. Looking at the page source, my live site has

<style type="text/css"> #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */ </style> <div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-4304 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><dl class='gallery-item'> <dt class='gallery-icon landscape'> <img decoding="async" width="150" height="150" src="https://tlmb.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/a5d0ac5b8dcc48fc-150x150.png" class="attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail" alt="Off-Grid podcast logo" srcset="https://tlmb.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/a5d0ac5b8dcc48fc-150x150.png 150w, https://tlmb.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/a5d0ac5b8dcc48fc-300x300.png 300w, https://tlmb.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/a5d0ac5b8dcc48fc.png 700w" sizes="(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /> </dt></dl> <br style='clear: both' />

But my test site just has
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="700" height="700" src="[test environment base url]/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/a5d0ac5b8dcc48fc.png" alt="Off-Grid podcast logo" class="wp-image-528" srcset="[test environment base url]/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/a5d0ac5b8dcc48fc.png 700w, [test environment base url]/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/a5d0ac5b8dcc48fc-300x300.png 300w, [test environment base url]/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/a5d0ac5b8dcc48fc-150x150.png 150w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" /></figure>

…which is clearly totally different, so I think this might be a clash with a plugin? Maybe Responsive Lightbox & Gallery. To test that theory, I went back to my test environment, deleted all the imported media and posts, and emptied the bin. Then I installed and activated Responsive Lightbox & Gallery, then I ran the importer again. The import ran fine as before, and the image was embedded full size, with just the < figure > code as above. Hm, so I’m not sure.

This isn’t a problem for the live import I’ve already done because
i. AP sends out the full image to fedi anyway, and
ii. I can manually edit those 2 posts if want.
I may try to deactivate RL&G and re-do the import of archive #4 on my live site, but not until the next AP release, so I thought I’d post this for now anyway.