Mastodon answers 422 when two first contacts from one actor race to
create its account (ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid on the unique uri), and
409 while another worker holds its lock. A persona that followed two
Mastodon accounts at once had one Follow refused that way; the job died
on its first attempt and the persona waited on "requested" forever.
Both answers are now retried twice on the usual backoff before they
count as refusals.
Found by the town (a village of 23 accounts on seven servers).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
Owner decision (2026-10-03, "A remote account deletes itself"): its posts are kept but
hidden everywhere.
- Post.AuthorGone (additive bool). DeleteHandler's actor-delete branch sets it on every
post whose ActorURI is the actor (one update-many), besides dropping its follows and
timeline rows as before. RemotePosts.Build sets it on a post stored later for an
account already marked Deleted.
- One rule in VisibilityPolicy: IsShown (not deleted, author not gone), IsPublic and
CanSee exclude AuthorGone, plus Shown(post) for loaded posts.
- Lookups by id answer 404 through CanSee (statuses/:id and every sub-route, context,
bookmarks, favourites, polls, reactions, search); provenance, account statuses,
home/public/tag timelines, notifications, conversations, reblogged_by, the clientapi
home and post/DM lists, a community's outbox and our Announces filter on IsShown or
IsPublic; the Mastodon mapper never renders a hidden post or a boost of one.
Tests (30 new):
- AuthorGoneTests: the rule, the handler (posts kept, boosts included, follows and rows
gone), a post fetched after the delete, and 20 Mastodon/ActivityPub lookups over HTTP
seen before and hidden after.
- InboxGapTests: actor Update refresh (name, sanitised summary, key rotation in place
and to a new key id) even with an older `updated`; Undo{Follow} by activity id and by
object; Reject of our QuoteRequest (and a stranger's ignored); group-wrapped
Announce{Like} and Announce{Undo{Like}}; a locked persona's pending follow,
FollowRequest notification, and Decide accepting and rejecting with the original Follow.
- JobHandlerTests: AncestorsJobHandler up to its depth limit; PollRefreshJob and
PollCloseJob (local and remote polls); InstanceDescriber from a peer's NodeInfo and
the weekly dedupe through ObjectRecords; LinkPreviews for public posts only;
DeliveryJobHandler outcomes (2xx, 404/410, 429/503 with Retry-After in seconds and as
a date, 5xx) and a signature and Digest the peer can verify; MediaJanitor.Sweep;
OAuthPruner.Prune.
- MigrationTests: _003, _004, _006 and _007 on seeded rows.
- PublicPagesTests: /@user and /@user/{id} (visibility, junk ids, exact CSP,
Referrer-Policy and nosniff), circle 404, community page, the instance actor,
ActivityPub redirects, and markup escaped in posts, titles and bios.
Production changes besides the rule:
- LinkPreviews.Handle re-checks that a post is still shown and public (the rule
Wanted applies) before fetching anything; before, only enqueueing checked it.
- The legacy /clientapi post and DM lists no longer return soft-deleted posts.
- MediaJanitor.Sweep and OAuthPruner.Prune are the loop bodies, now public and tested.
- InstanceDescriber.Address: a protected virtual identity seam so a test can point
the https NodeInfo addresses at a plain-http peer; production behaviour unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ELjqpznMFMNrJoJUj6K5p2
thepraandClaude Opus 5.5