A received Delete is recorded by Mastodon as a permanent tombstone —
later Creates for the same URI are silently refused forever. The old
code sent Delete on every non-public save 'just in case' (the comment
even called over-sending harmless); on the 2026-06-07 soak this
tombstoned an unlisted activity's URI before its first real publish,
making its later flip to public invisible on the remote with no error
anywhere.
- visibilityTransitionAction(previous, next): Create on any transition
to public (re-publish doubles as back-delivery; remotes dedupe by
id), Delete only when leaving public, nothing for
non-public→non-public.
- updateActivityVisibility reads the previous visibility and acts on
the transition.
- design.md documents the tombstone permanence + the user-facing
consequence (un-publish then re-publish won't resurrect the post on
remotes that processed the retraction — same as Mastodon's own
delete-and-redraft).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
