Erin KissaneJul 21, 2023

But what is the actual PROBLEM with Mastodon?? Said one hundred dozen people over several months of threads here. So I wrote it up.

It's too long, but we got bad doors, stilt-walking French shepherds, water bugs, a bunch of @/[email protected] quotations, What The Fuck Is Up With Bluesky, and more.

https://erinkissane.com/the-affordance-loop

Show threadErin KissaneJul 21, 2023
I would bet actual money that I've got some nuance of Mastodon's functionality wrong in there so when you see that please do lmk. I thought about asking instance-running friends to preview it but I've taken up enough of their time this week.
Show threadAnnika Backstrom
@kissane The part about which replies you see isn't 100% accurate, but an accurate description of how that works would be longer than the current post, so 🤷‍♀️
Jul 21, 2023 at 8:29amWeb
Show threadold man and the cbownsJul 21, 2023
@annika (I would 100% read a Painfully Accurate Description if there’s one out there or if you ever type it out; I am here for this nonsense)
Show threadAnnika BackstromJul 21, 2023

@cbowns ok so it's not THAT long, but people's eyes tend to glaze over. it boils down to: did your server have a *reason* to get the reply in question? let's say Alice makes a post and Bob replies. Reasons you would see the reply:

1. Bob is on your server (post originated on your server)
2. Alice is on your server (Bob's reply was directed at your server)
3. Somebody on your server follows Bob (Bob's posts are sent to your server)

Show threadAnnika BackstromJul 21, 2023

@cbowns 4. Somebody on your server follows Carol, and Carol boosts Bob's reply (the reply shows up on Carol's timeline, which is sent to your server)
5. Someone on your server visited the thread on any other server, and copied the origin URL into your server's search box (causing the reply to show up in your server's db and timelines)

That's everything, off the top of my head.

Show threadAnnika BackstromJul 21, 2023
@cbowns Notably absent from the list of "reasons" is the simple fact that a reply was posted. If I'm on server A, looking at a post from Server B, and there is a reply from Server C, there is no implicit relationship between servers A and C. C doesn't necessarily even know A exists, or that anybody from A saw the post on B. B could theoretically act as an intermediary, telling A about all the replies, but this isn't how it currently works.
Show threadjonny (nonvenomous)Jul 23, 2023

@annika
@kissane
yes this. you are right on with pretty much all of this, and love the piece, but one minor correction here:

If you are looking at replies to someone else’s post, you will only see the replies that come from instances that your instance already has a federation relationship with.

More precisely you will only see posts that come from accounts that someone on your instance follows. You don't get all the posts from all federated instances. (edit: and there is a ton more subtlety with eg. blocks and how different instances do federation and etc.)

Agreed its a way bigger problem than ppl realize. I really need to merge this and make it default instead of a button. one janky, low hanging fruit way to #FetchAllReplies is to abuse the search function: ask the OP instance what replies it knows about, then go and search for all of those

https://github.com/NeuromatchAcademy/mastodon/pull/8

[feature] fetch all replies by sneakers-the-rat · Pull Request #8 · NeuromatchAcademy/mastodon

Adds a button to the bottom of an expanded status to fetch all replies from the OP server (or as many as they will give us). Example: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/109582537808504261 Context: h...

GitHub