Simon WillisonDec 22, 2022

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

Show threadSimon WillisonDec 22, 2022

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)

Yes I knew about that
24%
No, I didn't know about that
70%
I don't understand the question
6%
Poll ended at .
Show threadDaniele Tricoli moved to [email protected]Dec 22, 2022
@simon It's the reason I usually go to external server to look at the post and then sometimes there is a point of the thread not visible in my instance where is better to reply, so I manually copy the URL of that post and I search it on my instance to reply under it.
Show threadSimon WillisonDec 22, 2022
@eriol yeah I've had to learn to do that for conversations that I want to engage in, but it's massively unintuitive (I imagine those of us who do that habitually are a tiny fraction of the Mastodon population) and pretty fiddly to do in a lot of clients - I'm using @pinafore right now and there's no "view original post" action, just a "copy link" one
Show threadDaniele Tricoli moved to [email protected]
@simon I agree it's totally unintuitive! Not used @pinafore yet (but I want to try it), so I don't know if it would be hard to support it, but I want to actually use the client before opening a feature request!
Dec 23, 2022 at 2:42pmWeb