If you see a post or reply in your timeline and you want to find out which thread it belongs to, just click on it! This will take you to the post or reply within its own thread, where you can then scroll up and down to see the rest of the thread.
(I know this might sound obvious to some of you but I have had several people ask about this, and there's no such thing as a silly question 👍 )
@FediTips Silly question from me below ;)
One of the "pain points" that I'm finding is that the threads I interact with outside my instance don't show the full history of other replies.
I understand that this is the decentralised nature of it where I need to visit the other instance in order to see more of the replies but is there a way to make the replies "federate" more?
Personally I find it a little annoying to use another instance and get used to a different layout and all.
Yes, this is a much discussed point. It is possible to manually force your server to notice the other replies, by copying the web address of a reply into the search box on your server, but that's cumbersome if you want lots of replies to be noticed.
There ought to be some kind of process that loads an entire thread's replies to your server when you ask it to.
There is an item on the Mastodon roadmap ("Explicit controls to fetch more data from origin server") which sounds like this.
p.s. If you're comfortable using Github, you can vote for this feature to be added by giving a thumbs up at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9409
There is an unofficial browser add-on called Substitoot which acts as a workaround at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/substitoot/ for Firefox and https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/substitoot-%E2%80%94-improved-mas/oedncfcpfcmehalbpdnekgaaldefpaef for Chrome.
Fedi.Tips
Hammy