@digital_carver it's a weird thing, as with many other things I would guess inherited from twitter and familiar to people who used it.

If you @ someone they will be notified, otherwise they will not be.

A reply is always part of the thread, but if you do not @ anyone it will also appear on your home and local timeline and on the follower's home timeline. Otherwise (replies with @) don't appear there. There might be settings for this and different backends work differently. I think Pleroma would show replies with @ to followers, because it shows those on local timeline.

I don't think the position of the @ matters, could be just a fedilab thing. Last time I tried it, it would indent to one level but not any deeper, so not being able to draw a proper tree it will show all the rest of the branches flat, so basically it show only the current branch with one level of indentation. Here again there can be difference between backends in the underlying structure of the thread.

Thanks @namark!

I wanted a reply to both appear in my timeline and also be obvious that it's a reply. On Twitter I think people do that with a '.' before the username because position matters there. I hadn't even thought about the different backends federated here though, that changes things too.

Let's see how this reply gets handled, whether it appears in my profile timeline and the local timeline, that should clear some things up about the Mastodon backend at least.

@namark Ok so it does look like the position doesn't change anything, replies don't appear on timelines if there's a @<someone> in it. Self-replies get treated differently though, it looks like, those do appear on the profile and follower timelines afaict. Why do things have to be so complicated! And worse, undocumented!!

@digital_carver I'm going do answer these rhetorical questions!

State of the industry maybe? Nothing really comes with a manual, or nobody reads them anyway. You're supposed to just give it a try and figure it out. It's "intuitive", and it is what it is. A virtual natural habitat. And people do, and everyone comes up with their own interpretation of what things are, and we just end up with a bunch of esoteric cultural artifact.

@digital_carver wait, this sounded too intriguing and fascinating... I meant this bad! ok? People actually design these things and they are exploiting our adaptivity, instead of reusing, improving and standardizing existing designs!

@namark I definitely interpreted it that way, it sounded like you were saying "it's an adventure, just go forth and explore, padawan" :) I'm sure I don't need adventures from software I'm trying to use!
I agree with what you're saying though, non-technical people seem especially adaptive in coming up with clever workarounds for missing features and weird design, it's us technical folk who are left fuming "if only they had properly implemented it this way!!"