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   RedstoneLP2 (redstonelp2@mastodon.redstonelp2.com)'s status on Thursday, 18-Dec-2025 08:53:44 JST RedstoneLP2

   how do fedi software deal with bogus dates/does activitypub allow bogus dates?

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     Blurry Moon (sun@shitposter.world)'s status on Thursday, 18-Dec-2025 08:53:41 JST Blurry Moon

     in reply to

     • arcanicanis
     @arcanicanis @RedstoneLP2 I don't know if it's still true but Pleroma used to just trust the date, years and years ago someone was sending out posts backdated to the 1600s.
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     arcanicanis (arcanicanis@were.social)'s status on Thursday, 18-Dec-2025 08:53:42 JST arcanicanis

     in reply to

     I guess by which context (server/client)?

     At least from what I remember, most things are pretty tolerant. Sometimes shown in the order it was discovered in (at least in a timeline).

     You can always toy experimentally with this by just static files of the JSON-LD context, as long as the correct media type is served. Mastodon (out of all other implementations) just tends to be the most fickle, expecting WebFinger resolution and a few other prerequisites (in terms of "test labbing" with static JSON files), while most others just simply need a resolvable actor object.

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     RedstoneLP2 (redstonelp2@mastodon.redstonelp2.com)'s status on Thursday, 18-Dec-2025 09:02:54 JST RedstoneLP2

     in reply to

     • arcanicanis
     • Blurry Moon

     @sun
     @arcanicanis
     tbh i was more thinking "57th of march" type of bogus date

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     Blurry Moon (sun@shitposter.world)'s status on Thursday, 18-Dec-2025 09:08:10 JST Blurry Moon

     in reply to

     • arcanicanis
     @RedstoneLP2 @arcanicanis the activities are sent with a standard json-formatted datetime, which allows you to formulate a bogus date, but in mastodon and pleroma's case these are inserted into the database as a timestamp type and if it's a bogus date, there is no way it can even be inserted, it will throw a hard error and fail to insert. I haven't tried it before with mastodon but this is a scenario where 999 times out of 1000, the insert is just going to fail and the data will be dropped. you would have to go out of your way to deliberately retain data with a bad date.
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     arcanicanis (arcanicanis@were.social)'s status on Thursday, 18-Dec-2025 10:43:05 JST arcanicanis

     in reply to

     • Blurry Moon

     Here's some test fixtures you can play with:

     https://arcanican.is/fedi/tests/25/timestamp-good

     https://arcanican.is/fedi/tests/25/timestamp-bad

     Try manually pulling each URL using the 'search' of your instance. First should work, the second is the date you describe. The latter fails on Pleroma apparently, as @sun had mentioned.

     I also have a query tool at: https://arcanican.is/tools/activitypub.php

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