My least favourite sharp edge of Mastodon is the fact that when you view someone else's post you only see replies to it that are known to your server - so there's actually a good chance there will be replies that are completely invisible to you, especially if you run your own instance
I'd love it if tapping a post kicked off a request back to the original server that fetched the current reply count and provided a "view all replies" button if there were replies not yet visible to me
My hunch here is that very few people see even aware of this Mastodon feature
So, a poll: prior to reading this thread, did you know that Mastodon by default will only show you public replies to a post if those replies have already been fetched into your server somehow?
(This only affects you when you view a post that originated on a server other than your home server - if the original post author is on the same server as you then you'll see all of the replies)
A frustrating aspect of this issue is that it only affects people with accounts on smaller servers
If you're on https://mastodon.social/ the chance of you ever experiencing this problem is pretty tiny, because almost every post in the whole Mastodon network flows through mastodon.social at some point, since the millions of users on that server are subscribed to effectively everyone else
If you run an instance with only one user - like I do - then you'll run into this all the time
@simon
there are definitely a few of these opaque issues i'm figuring out as i see them.
related to this is looking up followers/follows - unless you go to a user's instance directly you only see the list of users on your instance that also follow/are followed.
would love to have a way to pull in the full federated data set from where i am and not have to open a web browser or other trick to see.
Simon Willison
Cranky David