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 Hometown has reverted that behaviour, and clicking on the timestamp will open the link to the origin instance in a new browser tab (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v4.0.2+hometown-1.1.0#tweaks). So you keep your logged-in browser tab, and have the full thread on the origin instance in another one.
On a small instance, having a limited view of the replies is the more significant barrier.
@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 ...
@waldoj @gloriousnoise No one at mastodon is working on it. There have been multiple still-open issues in their GitHub *for years* but nothing has been done.
This is what started me looking at other federation software.
@waldoj Yeah, I think that's one of those design choices in #ActivityPub that can be argued a flaw depending on point of view.
If it had complete federation like #Usenet, there wouldn't be such a problem.
But the tradeoff is that doing so induces much greater load on the server even if all you're sharing is plaintext, nevermind images.
Article expiration on servers was also a Usenet way of addressing that problem, whereas most ActivityPub implementations right now assume some permanence.
@waldoj in some respects, I think this is why I find that when I boost posts from one of my accounts on one of my others, posts get more traction
I have some cross-following of my accounts going on with a few of them for this reason, usually to boost photo posts that I think followers (or followers of those followers) would enjoy.
@waldoj all the more reason to learn to use hashtags the way Mastodonts pre-birdsite exodus / influx did; the way the platform design intended.
@davidschlangen
And unlisted replies show for my home timeline, but not for my lists? Or am I mistaken?
@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.
What I usually do is update the main post -- if necessary, in all caps, before the original message -- to reflect any change in status (as in "UPDATE: I found the info I was looking for").
Also, usually people can see the responses if they go looking for them, but the UI may or may not give any hint that there are replies until you click on it, and a lot of people (myself often included) forget to check.
[edit] Also, if there's any possibility your server isn't federating with the servers of people replying (I've not heard of this happening except in cases where one server has the other one limited/blocked), you can always click on the timestamp to see the post on the author's own server, which will show any public replies the author can see.
@woozle @waldoj @mzagaja Facebook does it with a "View More Comments" and a "See All Comments" that both have to be clicked repeatedly, with a stalled and partial response. So it ain't just the fediverse, but yeah UX should represent incomplete display of comments.
Even after all have been displayed, facebook keeps displaying a clickable "See All Comments." It's crap design to invite users to pull a string attached to nothing but vapid bot rot abounds so we're already used to it.
@woozle Only problem with updating the main post is that editing posts is a relatively new feature that many servers/clients don't support yet, including the one I'm on. Oops!
I had to open your post in a new tab to see that you had edited it.
@mzagaja @waldoj Actually if you go out, and click and look at the post on the origin node, you should see all the replies. Not very convenient.
OTOH, dodo seems to have problems to correctly filling timelines in the last month or so too, despite being “a centralized” service, guess shutting down too many microservices AND firing the engineers who know about them isn't a solution either.
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