@supernovae@universeodon.com But you're missing the point that your complaints aren't about Mastodon itself but about the underlying Fediverse, of which Mastodon is only a client.
The reason this matters is because it's about identifying the responsible piece, especially if we want to improve or fix it.
#Mastodon can't change the issues you're bringing up. #ActivityPub that runs the #Fediverse might be improved, as that's where those behaviors live, so that's where the finger needs to be pointed.
@helge @supernovae @John @volkris if I was faced with such a decision to make I would choose the performance too.
The point of fedi for me is not in numbers of likes & toots - and now I'm kinda happy to know that we cannot strictly rely on them. This makes our actions more personal and conscious.
@axkira @helge @supernovae@universeodon.com @John
Well, it's not even just about performance.
It's about the possibility that depending on how the userbase scales up, it might literally become physically impossible to transfer and duplicate all of that content all around the world.
The design of ActivityPub has issues. I'm critical of how it was set up. But, given what it's working with, there's the real possibility that the whole system would collapse should they try to make sure every reaction goes to every other instance all at once.
This is the downside of more distributed approaches. They are necessarily less efficient. That's the tradeoff.
Oh, no, not at all. That's not how this system works.
Mastodon doesn't receive those replies, boosts, and likes at all. It's not an implementation choice; since Mastodon doesn't receive the signal it couldn't display the reply/boost/like whether it wanted to or not.
@supernovae@universeodon.com @John
There is a little word called fetch in my post. Also as most of the fediverse is mastodon, it is still Mastodon's fault likes are not send to everyone.
These things all boil down to implementation choices if mastodon. For example friendica sends likes to everyone.
@helge @supernovae @John @volkris Mastodon doesn't implement ActivityPub in a faithful manner (compared to how it is described in the docs), it takes quite a few liberties with it. Furthermore, it became so popular that the underlying protocol of the whole network is not really ActivityPub anymore, but the protocol which Mastodon implicitly defined.
The points brought up: Missing replies, missing boosts, missing likes are actually pure implementation choices of Mastodon.
Of course, going into the details of why this is Mastodon faults, requires understanding the underlying technological stack. Fixing it is "simple". Just fetch all replies from the original server, when viewing content. A client application can do this as well as Mastodon. It just involved a lot of network traffic.
That Mastodon doesn't do this, has simple performance considerations. Mastodon is build to allow somebody to host an instance with almost 1 million registered users.