As expected, when an instance attempts to respond to a Note with a larger audience than the note replied to, Mastodon will silently drop it from processing.

I don't actually know if this is codified anywhere in #ActivityPub or #ActivityStreams spec, but looking into it now.

Edit: Might be it actually is processed, but doesn't link up to the more-restrictive parent. Also good I think. Not quite sure how I'd handle this in #nodebb ...

@devnull Pro tip: for testing against Mastodon (or really AP in general), you could try to run the activitypub.academy software, which shows the activities it receives (and maybe sends?) in a log. I would have recommended activitypub.academy itself but it seems to be down.

@blake thanks! I do use it actually, although as you say, it's a little fragile at times. I tried using it to send stuff back and forth and the entire thing went down momentarily 🫤

Also activitypub.academy is like Mastodon but isn't quite... might be a fork of an earlier version? There were some minor differences that would've caused headaches if I didn't test it live, so to say...

@devnull it should link up and be handled fine... not sure what your test case looks like?

@trwnh I was just doing a couple back-and-forth toots between my two instances (one #nodebb, the other Mastodon), and the public response to the private mention didn't show up in my Mastodon feed so perhaps it was just a hiccup.

It definitely would be easier if it all linked up as expected but didn't show what you're not supposed to see

@devnull mastodon only shows replies if you follow both the author and the person being replied to -- it should be fine if you follow the person making the private post

@devnull like this is a private post

While I can see it all on crag.social, on bb.devnull.land the public post doesn't resolve back up to the parent because it encountered a 404 and promptly crashed — so no, it shouldn't crash but the 404 is an indication that there's nothing there, not that there's something but I can't see it

@trwnh @devnull in my limited experience compared to you, it seems as though as long as you follow the person being replied to AND the server at least knows that the other account exists, then the replies will be federated all the way through. But if the server didn't know about the replier beforehand, it doesn't come through. Do you think this is correct?‍️

@BeAware @devnull if you have at least one recipient there (someone following you or mentioned by you), then yeah, your posts will be sent to that server

It turns out I had a mistake in my logic and inReplyTo was incorrectly set. Must re-test...

I think so... the third-party won't see the private responses in-between unless the server happens to know about them (in which case they can either be omitted or a placeholder shown in its place).

In the case of this instance, I don't see the private responses in between and so I can't traverse up the chain to the parent, but I think that is ok... system working as intended.