today's lesson for me: if i open a mastodon thread and see a set of replies, there's zero guarantee these:
- are the same replies others see
- are the same replies OP sees
- are a reasonable, close subset of any of those
- don't magically omit all of the harassment someone receives

this is, fucked up

@whitequark you'll get a better view if you visit the original post on its instance, but it's not perfect.

this is a mastodon design decision btw. the instance i have an alt on has reverted this change

@dysfun @whitequark …what design decision are you referring to here?

(It is kind of unfortunate that everyone implemented AP “wrong” and now has to do so many of these things the hard way. Oh well, such is life…)

@erincandescent @whitequark oh it doesn't federate all the responses properly. and it doesn't even try with stuff like likes

@dysfun @whitequark so like. instances were supposed to forward all replies to every recipient of the original thread but this doesn’t happen due to a mixture of bad early implementation decisions that now haunt everyone.

mastodon is not alone in making this decision; pretty much everyone did. mastodon and misskey are pretty much the only bits of software which can sign (and verify) posts in a forwardable way and everyone is slowly rolling that back too because it opens its own harassment vectors

@dysfun @whitequark anyway the original sin was people thinking you could have “getting a list of all replies to a post” happen in any way other than asking the poster’s server and the ongoing sin is people continuing with this failed model.

@erincandescent @whitequark @dysfun primordial sin was privileging replies as anything special in the first place, instead of having actual honest-to-god moderated conversations