Interesting to see how more technically oriented people on Twitter are promoting Bluesky as Twitter's alternative, while people from my research interests (Middle Ages) are preferring Mastodon.

@catominor it's in private beta? Have you used it yet? I believe @ednico has access to it?

@nhan @ednico Yup, I have it but it feels like Twitter with fewer features, to be honest.

@catominor @nhan Agreed. I opened it and thought I was in Twitter of a few years ago. It is too similar in my opinion. I am sure it will get feature parity soon, but it also needs something to differentiate it (apart from the owner and algo)

@ednico @nhan Exactly. It feels like a Twitter for Techno-folks where there is a big promise of a protocol that will bring some super cool things in future. But how many of these have been here already?

@catominor @ednico @nhan@pkm.social After feature parity, what it and probably all other alternatives need is a total collapse of Twitter where people move in droves to have a network effect. I signed up for post.news last year, and have been there for a total of less than 10 times. None of the PKM, Obsidian, Logseq, etc. is there lol.

@catominor @ednico @nhan@pkm.social As much I like the principles and many aspects of Mastodon, the UX sucks (I documented it here https://dev.phanpy.social/#/mastodon.social/s/110222531789412875?view=full). But so far for the thing I use Twitter for (mostly PKM and recently AI), I'm happy with the pkm.social community here and using Substack to follow some AI writers. Twitter unfortunately is still where I discover interesting things/people but it is increasingly less so.

@nhan@mastodon.social @ednico @nhan@pkm.social I really like elk.zone client for Mastodon, it makes its UI and UX much better. Have you tried it?

@catominor @nhan@mastodon.social @ednico I'm using Phanpy, much prefer how conversation is presented in the Reddit-like way. Either of those clients greatly improve both UI and UX.

However, there are inherent limitations built into the design of Mastodon that these apps can't work around. For example, a conversation viewed from your server may not be fully loaded. You may be missing out on lots of 2nd and 3rd level replies without knowing it.

@catominor @ednico Don't know if you have run into this issue (and understandably if you haven't because you may not aware of it).

E.g. from your server (such as pkm.social), you view a thread on mastodon.social and see only 25 replies, but if you view it on mastodon.social there are 50 replies! Many 2nd and 3rd-level replies only load in your server if you search for them using the link, and thus trigger your server to load that reply so you can comment/boost/interact with it from your server.

@catominor @ednico The worst part is that there's no missing-reply indication to tell you to switch to the original server to follow the full conversation.

I think the design is to make the server small enough so that it can be easily host by people thus ensuring the decentralization aspect and only load replies as needed (If you don't need to interact your server doesn't need to load it--makes sense!). But having to switch back and forth to read a conversation will never cut it for the masses.

@nhan @ednico Thanks, I did not know about this!

@catominor @ednico Just ran into this issue again today. The picture would make it much easier to understand.

@catominor @ednico Afaik. Phanpy provides an easy way to switch between your server and the original post's server but Elk Zone doesn't. Another reason why I use Phanpy.

@nhan @ednico Such bad design on Mastodon side :(

@catominor @nhan @ednico

It's not intended, it's a issue with ActivityPub protocol. Decentralization is hard, a better protocol is Matrix.org that is indeed way more complex.

The only thingh you can do now to mitigate the issue is following more people on different instances so that yours is made aware of their existence (that's the condition to show other people's comments).

Or you can move to a larger instance.

The issue became more evident recently with the mass migration from Twitter and the many new little instances that are still not well connected.

@post @nhan @ednico Fascinating, I have never heard about this before and it seems to be quite a crucial problem.

@catominor @nhan @ednico

Protocols for decentralized networks are an academic field on their own because they pose many additional challenges compared to centralized ones including scaling issues.

For context ActivityPub is the result of years of development by the authors of previous Fediverse protocols like OStatus and pump.io. And now AP is a W3C standard (the consortium that standardize the Web).

I hope Mastodon and the others figure out a client-side solution like some third party Mastodon clients are doing (but I suspect they are using Mastodon client-server API so it's a Mastodon-specific solution, not an AP/Fediverse one).