Manage remote profile history

Remote history fetches older public and unlisted posts when a signed-in member opens a remote Person or Service profile. It is disabled by default.

Enable or disable

With Manage federation permission, open Administration → History and turn on Enable remote history hydration. Leave Resolve bare item IRIs off initially; it adds individual object fetches for servers whose outbox pages contain links instead of embedded posts.

Open a known remote profile while signed in. Its history state should progress from queued or fetching to partial or complete. Check the History page for failures, queue growth, and storage by origin. Media is fetched when viewed; loading history should not create notifications or outgoing activities.

To stop new work, clear Enable remote history hydration. An active request may finish within its 30-second limit. Queued jobs remain and resume when the feature is enabled again; cached posts remain readable.

Limits

Work	Limit
Items examined per page	20
Pages per member action	1
Collection documents fetched initially	2
Concurrent jobs per origin	1
Queued jobs per origin	2
JSON response	2 MiB
Job duration	30 seconds
Individual object fetches with bare-IRI resolution	5 per page

These limits are fixed. Operators can change retention from 1 to 3650 days; its default is 90 days.

Read the history state

State	Meaning or next step
`idle`	No active fetch
`queued` / `fetching`	Work is pending or running
`partial`	More may be available; the member can choose Load older posts
`complete`	The observed collection had no unfetched next page
`unsupported`	The collection, attribution, authorization, or federation policy prevented this attempt
`backoff`	A transport error, timeout, or rate limit delayed retry; check `retry_at`

The profile panel and API expose attempts, retry time, and item counts. Use the admin failure and origin tables to narrow down a problem, then inspect worker logs. Repeated requests coalesce. Restarting the server does not clear stored backoff; expired job leases are reclaimed.

If images fail, check the media proxy and origin availability. History images are cached on demand and videos when played. A member’s Allow direct remote media preference permits a direct-origin fallback after proxy failure.

Retention and pruning

An hourly sweep removes up to 200 stale history posts. Viewing an actor’s profile refreshes its retention clock. Posts received through live delivery or referenced by local bookmarks, favourites, pins, reactions, votes, replies, boosts, quotes, or reports are preserved.

Review Cold statuses, Stored text bytes, and Cold storage by origin before shortening retention. Prune one batch now applies the retention rule to at most 200 rows and queues media cleanup. Avoid deleting status rows manually, which bypasses those checks. Pruned posts can be fetched again only while the remote server still provides them.

Client API

The endpoints use the OAuth read scope:

GET /api/v1/accounts/:id/remote_history reads local history state.
POST /api/v1/accounts/:id/remote_history/fetch requests more history.
An authenticated first-page GET /api/v1/accounts/:id/statuses can also queue the initial fetch. Anonymous, paginated, and pinned-only requests do not.

Unexpected activity

Disable history fetching if cached history appears in home/public/list/tag feeds, streaming, or full-text search, or if importing it creates notifications or outgoing federation work. Retain the affected actor and post IDs, timestamps, and logs for investigation. Cached history should remain confined to profile history until it is received through normal delivery.