Waldo JaquithMar 4, 2023

To have a viral post on Mastodon is to be confronted with a long series of people asking the exact same question or providing the same “well actually” response, for days, because of the limits of federation. They simply can’t see those other replies. Sometimes they see *no* ofher replies, if they’re on a tiny server.

The experience isn’t great! As with customer service, it can be hard to remember that this isn’t actually the same person over and over again.

Show threadEugen RochkoMar 4, 2023
@waldoj I’m not 100% behind on blaming this on federation/decentralization. It could be a UX issue because you’re not required to view the thread before writing a reply, and/or because the count of replies isn’t displayed clearly. It could also simply be an innate effect of virality. Do comments on e.g. frontpage Reddit posts contain a lot of repeat sentiments?
Show threadTim McCormackMar 4, 2023
@Gargron This is definitely a federation thing, and I've experienced what @waldoj observes myself (although in the role of commenter, not viral author). I see a heavily boosted post with just a few comments, and I know that's not accurate, so I use "open original page" and now I see a long list of heavily repetitive replies, most of whom probably did *not* open the original. I think this happens when commenter A and commenter B are on different instances that don't have any follows between them.
Show threadTim McCormackMar 4, 2023
@Gargron There are huge horizon effects within Mastodon, and while I think that's OK to some extent (perfect consistency is not required) there's definitely a lot of UX work to be done to overcome some of the negative effects. The obvious but naive solution is to ask the original server for what *it* knows about the list of replies, but I don't know how to make that fit within ActivityPub's model. Probably some clients just take that approach anyway, though. @waldoj
Show threadTim McCormackMar 4, 2023
@Gargron I wonder, do you have an alt account on a small instance? If not, I strongly recommend it—you're going to miss out on some critical parts of the Mastodon user experience if you only ever use mastodon.social.
Show threadBrian Kammer 🇺🇦
@timmc How so?
Mar 4, 2023 at 3:14pmIvory for iOS
Show threadTim McCormackMar 4, 2023
@WarFreeZone Well, like the things I just said about federation issues.
Show threadTim McCormackMar 4, 2023
@WarFreeZone ...except now I'm wondering if you actually are suffering from exactly the small-instance issues I was talking about, and therefore couldn't see the upthread posts. 😅 Here: https://better.boston/@timmc/109965381868262838
Tim McCormack (@[email protected])

@[email protected] I wonder, do you have an alt account on a small instance? If not, I strongly recommend it—you're going to miss out on some critical parts of the Mastodon user experience if you only ever use mastodon.social.

Better Boston
Show threadBrian Kammer 🇺🇦Mar 4, 2023
@timmc Fair enough. I thought there were other kinds of experiences one misses out on without having another profile on another server.
Show threadTim McCormackMar 4, 2023
@WarFreeZone I suppose I did use the plural, didn't I. :-) That's really the big thing, though. I think the only other thing I can think of is that it's just generally a lot quieter on a small instance, for better or worse.