Follow relationship inconsistency caused by rollback
A few days ago, my server was terminated and deleted by Oracle Cloud without any reason. Oracle Customer Service did not respond to my questions about data backup. I can only restart my server on another machine with a backup from months ago.
Since it it not the first time I encountered follow relationship inconsistency on Pleroma, I try to be as detailed as possible.
Following
Supposed you sent someone a follow request and passed after the date of backup, now you want to follow this person again. Mastodon will pass your follow request immediately. But when it comes to Pleroma, the follow status is "awaiting approval" on my server, while on the other side pleroma will send a notification to the user that "xxx is following you".
Now if you cancel your follow request and send a follow request again, this problem can be fixed. But if this process was interrupted due to some problems(network, unavailability, ...), you may have to repeat it multiple times.
Followers
It's the most confusing part. No matter the new follower is from Mastodon or Pleroma, if it unfollows you and send a follow request again, you will get a notification that "xxx has sent you a follow request". But when you check for it, the count of your follow requests is still 0.
To fix this inconsistency, you have to ask it to cancel and resend follow request again. Still, if this process was interrupted, you should repeat it again and again.
I don't know if ActivityPub has a federated "follow state" record, but this process is tedious and confusing. Is it possible to improve it?