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digitalcourage.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
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Dr. Seltsam

(which runs ) has made some very strange design choices. The link and screenshot below explain the most worrying one.

When someone posts something, in your normal client you cannot be sure that you have read all the comments and thoughts of other users, as you only see the comments known to your instance. The same goes for likes and boots. You cannot know how popular something really is.

This has two logical consequences:
1.) You want to join a server that is as big as possible, so that your server knows more other servers and you see more. This leads to few big servers and against .
2.) Mastodon becomes a broadcasting platform where discussions are useless because you don't know if the post hasn't been discussed underneath. This would be great for politicians and businesses, but bad for everyone else.

I think we should really fix these problems.

maria-antoniak.github.io/2023/

Conversations are broken When you click on a post to see all of its replies, you only see replies known to your server. Whole conversation threads are invisible to you, unless you manually click through to the “original post.” Most Mastodon users are unaware of this issue. I think this immediately leads to two bad effects, with more likely downstream. First, I think this contributes to Mastodon'’s infamous frequency of “reply guys” (see below), which turns a lot of people off the platform. If you see someone’s post but can't see the 10 other people already replying to the post, you might unintentionally reply with the same advice, aggravating the poor poster who doesn'’t realize why this is happening. Second, because replies are shown if people on your instance follow the reply author, you're stuck in a filter-bubble whose boundaries you might not understand. You think that by following someone, you're exposing yourself to not just their content but also their audience and community, but you're actually only seeing the subset of their community interaction that already intersects with your home community. (Edit: A third bad effect occurred to me. For users experiencing harassment from other servers, this might result in a disorienting harassment bubble where your allies can't see what's happening to you.)
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Evan Prodromou

@DrSeltsam ActivityPub has a collection of replies for every object. If you want to get those replies, use it.

w3.org/TR/activitystreams-voca

www.w3.orgActivity Vocabulary
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Dr. Seltsam

@evan thanks for the comment. How would I do this?

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Evan Prodromou

@DrSeltsam ah, OK! I started a conversation recently about clients that use the replies collection for showing replies. I'll see if I can find some recommendations. Probably at this point, ask the developer of your favourite client to use it.

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