I wish Mastodon had a way for me to disable replies on my posts entirely.
- I post a breadcrumb link to a post on my actual blog.
- Someone clicks through and reads the whole thing (because they have clearly read parts that were not in the excerpt here).
- Then they *close that window* and hit reply here, instead of there.
- Now the discussion is bifurcated, great job everybody.
@jwz how would you ever expect that to be working?
"nah, you can't respond with a toot to that list of URLs ever"
(no matter if the URL is your toot about your post, or your original post itself)
@drazraeltod Replies to a post should be metadata on that post. The post itself should have primacy. For someone to see a reply to my post, they should need to retrieve it from my instance. That would also allow me to moderate replies, delete them, and prevent posts from people I have blocked from being seen by others who follow me.
I am well aware that this is not how the ActivityPub design works, and I am here to tell you that in this way the design is bad, and the designers should feel bad.
@jwz Wholly agree with you. Fwiw there's some specifications in progress to fix this. (So, we may live to see this deployed.)
My impression is that so many Fediverse fans WANT it to work exactly like this, so any change that might be an progress would be a major break from the intended behavior.
In other words, my impression is that SO many people consider this behavior to be a feature, not a bug, that would be broken by a change.
I think it's a bad decision for so many reasons, but so many people love it that way.
My impression is that so many Fediverse/Mastodon fans really want this platform to function the same way Twitter does, with its free-wheeling, firehose, comment-forward design, rather than the way other platforms work, with more of a post-centric approach.
Come to think of it, I'd also point to opposition to longer content (like this) that they say "ruins" the experience. They want the *feature* of having writing constrained with character limits.
So many seem to want Twitter... just not on Twitter... so they want the very features that kept me, personally, away from Twitter.
In the end some of those design choices do represent forks in the road that can't really be taken both ways.
@volkris @jwz I dunno. A lot of the vehement anti-feature-request reactions read to me more as people being /defensive/ rather than actively preferring. Like, they read "hey I want this feature" as an attack on Fediverse in general, and are reactively defensive about the arbitrary set of features Mastodon chose at the beginning. Faced with actual implementations of those features, I don't think people notice or care as much. I could be reading them wrong; I haven't done proper studies.