Automated/automatic post deletion does not work.

[biglifedecision]

Steps to reproduce the problem

Users enable automated post deletion in their preferences. Users wait.

Expected behaviour

Posts should be automatically deleted, eventually.

Actual behaviour

either no posts have ever been deleted automatically, or some were at one point and the process has since stalled for all users.

Detailed description

So, as far as I can tell none of the users who have enabled this feature are actually seeing their posts being deleted automatically. Some recall that when we first got the feature, they did see posts being deleted, but I don't have empirical evidence of this. Users just report recalling seeing their total posts change, but may have also been deleting posts manually.

Out of maybe 30 active users, 14 have the feature enabled, with various settings, and no one is reporting it works. From some debugging which is reported on in this Mastodon issue it seems that the process is not happening at all.

Our server is not particularly busy or strained, the sidekiq queues are basically always empty with a latency of 0. Our server was running close to the max of memory and filling up the swap constantly, but everyone has suggested this is not likely to be an issue - I also tried upgrading our server and have seen no change.

I am already in the above linked issue for Mastodon, but I figured I would open an issue here just in case it is a Hometown-specific bug.

There are improvements in this feature in a newer version of Mastodon that Hometown isn't caught up with yet that are supposed to address the process not kicking on very large servers - it should work just fine as is on small servers like ours. We shouldn't be hitting any of those limits now, and it's doubtful that fix would do anything for us.

There is also a bug:

There is also a bug causing deletions to not spread out across accounts as deleted but instead will not delete any post of the users who enabled the feature last before it has finished deleting posts from the older accounts. This has been fixed in the development version, but not in any release yet.

But I have a little trouble parsing that and figuring out if it could be an issue for me or not.

also

There have also been multiple changes after 4.1.2 that make the process more aggressive and more efficient.

So, maybe I just have to wait!

Specifications

v4.0.2+hometown-1.1.1
Running on a VPS with 2GB of RAM (now 4GB)
30 or so active users (most of them pretty low activity, and a handful of daily posters)