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.
@nelson Up until Mastodon 4.0, clicking on the timestamp below a post would take you directly to the origin instance with its full view of all replies (minus blocked accounts and instances).
This was then deemed too complicated and different from how the official Mastodon mobile client behaved, and the link to the post on the original instance is now hidden behind the context menu as "Open original page". Which, surprisingly, no one uses. 
@Gargron @galaxis @nelson @waldoj People are now complaining in the reverse, and that could have been predicted before the change was implemented.
"Attempt to look at this post in its home context, as opposed to just the context it is presented to me in" is a fundamentally important behavior in an ActivityPub-style federated network.
As part pf the evidence for this, you can look at the behavior of the vast majority of apps that were not directly created by you.
As part of the theoretical backing for this, you can look at danah boyd's concept of Context Collapse.
This has been part of the discussion here for the past five years.
@Gargron @galaxis @nelson @waldoj I think if you remove basic functionality and replace it with something that explicitly fails at precisely the "helping with context collapse" point where that functionality was important, you need to make your pathway to seeing the place you've moved that functionality immediately obvious.
Label it explicitly, sure, but going from "what is MY view" to "what is THEIR view"* needs to be an highly visible, intuitive click. That motion is a basic perspective-taking tool necessary to claw back collapsed contexts.
(* to the extent that is viewable by the general public)
Steps to reproduce the problem From the web version, open a post from a remote user Attempt to open any existing link to their profile or post in order to see it in the original context, e.g. with ...
Waldo Jaquith
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