I gather that it had a use unrelated to Lemmy but for Lemmy posts I make a case here that it is more misleading than helpful. For a moment, please ignore the underlying reasons why things are the way they are and focus on how the issue presents to the end-users.
(1) By pulling in solely the post, but not any of the comments, it at best provides only partial information - which if all you wanted to read was the post, then why bother pulling it here at all? (as opposed to retrieving from its original location - I mean, to do it you already need the full URL...) While if instead you wanted all of the comments... - e.g. to be able to reply to - then too bad, b/c it won't do that?
(2) It also does not pull in any of the old vote counts. So if hypothetically a post had 1000 upvotes, and then after pulling it here it received adjustments +2 from upvotes and -4 from downvotes, then its total would then be 998, right? Except PieFed would instead display "-2", a qualitatively different score for a highly popular post that is a terrible misrepresentation of the actual facts about it.
(3) It conveys a distorted view of things to the end-users. e.g. see [email protected] where there are 6 posts from the last 2 months, right? Right?! No, there is actually only a single post there in its entirety, then a few more that I and what I assume was Blaze pulled in - note how those other 5 have zero comments, and total scores near zero, due to the aforementioned issues. Really the "earliest" post that PieFed.social reliably has from that community is from 4 days ago, and then beyond that is a scattered, partial mess. There are actually MANY more posts from the last two months, which are not represented here. Ergo, the initial impression that a quick glance at this community offers turns out to be false, due to these federation issues.
(4) showing only partial information is often called a "false positive" or type I style of error, whereas showing nothing at all for those posts that are not fully here avoids that pitfall. If certain content is not here then... well it is not here, and that's that, but for only some of it to be here leads to much confusion, imho.
Almost entirely distinct from this issue, the ability to find an existing post given its URL should be added to the search menu, b/c that is where people will go to find it. But ofc all the more so if the retrieval button is removed or made less prominent, so that that find ability is not lost along with that.
I understand that there are hard limitations of the federated model itself. So if e.g. older comments and votes cannot retroactively be pulled in - or possibly even if so - then maybe this function should just be abolished? Or perhaps a couple more layers of "are you sure you want to do this?" added, or better yet moving it from its prominent place showing up to everyone on almost every page to a more subdued location where only those who know what it is and what will happen if it is used are likely to access it? I now feel that I actively made the situation in [email protected] worse by pulling in those posts, and wished now that I hadn't done so, as it could lead people astray into thinking "this is all the posts that the community has to offer from this time-period" (NO, it actually has MANY MANY more than that, on the original server!?!!). Now that I know this I can refrain from using it, but it would be nice to help others who climb this ladder after me as well:-). So I am sharing my thoughts with you in case that helps.
PieFed is freaking awesome and you all who work on it are magnificently extraordinary to share your knowledge with the world:-).
It's difficult. Lemmy doesn't supply a list of replies when we retrieve the post over ActivityPub, nor votes. We could probably get that data by calling their API but that feels wrong.
The fediverse has developed a convention of pasting urls into the search function in order to retrieve a post but I don't think it's intuitive for new users to do that; a search tool is for searching, not importing. It'd be great to find a better way to integrate this feature.
It feels like it should be OK for piefed to implement an extra "proper import" feature somewhere, which actually goes and retrieves post with full comments and votes. I don't think any instance admin would have an issue with it. I certainly don't care unless someone finds a way to turn this into a DDOS (which can be dealt with rate limits)
(& [email protected] - we'll see if notifications like this work here as well!:-P)
Yes [email protected] your idea would be better than it is now - the benefit would be to allow someone to reply to comments on that post, with an account based on PieFed rather than needing to create one on a remote instance. Although even Lemmy does not have this capability (afaik?) to retrieve posts from a remote instance, so there is no "expectation" that it be provided.
Just to reiterate: if the retrieval function was to either be enhanced to work fully & properly, or else to go away entirely - or at least be de-emphasized (right now it seems available from almost every page across the entire piefed.social site?) so that common users (like me!:-P) don't just play around with it willy-nilly and generate such partial (mis-)information postings - then either way that would solve the problem.
The problem, imho anyway, is the presence of the partial information, which is so confusing to people. But again: if the retrieval function was simply not present at all, that does not seem all that "bad" to me? (especially since, again afaict, Lemmy lacks it too, at least for non-admins)
And I can't really speak to Rimu's comment about whether it's "cheating" to use the API, except naively to say that doing something all of once upon a special request each time might not be all that bad? Though that's still code to have to write, test, deploy, investigate for potential exploits, etc., and I am not sure how commonly people would really want to make use of it? Although if they did, I could see someone wanting to get e.g. all of the posts for the past several months for a community that nobody has previously subscribed to on a PieFed instance. But that's a lot of effort for seemingly little gain? Purely from an end-user perspective, I would rather see things like adding a Preview option to comment replies and/or making the replies to comments be in-line in the sam epage (especially since after you do something, like perhaps editing a reply, the web UI deposits you to a different page than where you started, and you have to go hunt for the reply you just worked on, possibly having to delve deeper into the comment chain i.e. so that a browser "find" may not work, just to see how your comment ended up being rendered; e.g. I've made comments where the image was not rendered correctly, or just this morning I noticed that my mobile browser had put a space between the [url display text] (https://actualurlhere.com) - so this is a common item that I end up having to deal with multiple times a day and sometimes multiple times per hour; while in contrast, I virtually never need to see an old post and reply to it; so while the presence of the misinformation is confusing and I hope can be dealt with sooner, the expansion of the retrieval function is a significantly lower priority issue - again, just imho, in case it helps to hear from a fresh POV:-D)