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
@simon A big part of the problem is that at scale, that would probably make existing performance issues even worse.
"George Takei posts, and the fediverse shuts down".
@ocdtrekkie yeah I guess that's always the catch with this - the home instances of high-follower accounts would have to be able to serve a HUGE spike of GET requests (which could be cached, but still a lot of incoming traffic)
I really, really want a fix for this though! It's a very real problem for me - I've found myself replying to someone with material that's already been covered in other invisible-to-me replies quite a few times at this point, which makes me look rude
Simon Willison
ocdtrekkie
CubeThoughts
AlisonW ♿🏳️🌈♾️