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.
For those who don’t know: The way Masotodon federation works, your server only knows about other servers that its members follow folks on (and I think there is some further scoping-down from there). So if you see a viral post, that may have hundreds of responses from folks on small Mastodon instances that don’t peer with yours, so you can’t see them. But the author of the post can!
It’s like hosting a Q&A session in a big auditorium with 1,000 people where many people think it’s a crowd of 10.
@davidschlangen
Either way, I'd like to have an option to make replies that are visible to everyone in the discussion, but do NOT show up in my followers timeline. There are discussions I want to participate in, but that I doubt are relevant to the few foolhardies following me.
Whether they show up in the local timeline, I don't care. When people drink from the firehose, they expect irrelevance.
Waldo Jaquith
Eugen Rochko
David Schlangen
notsoloud