Simon Willison’s Weblog

Mastodon 4.5 (via) This new release of Mastodon adds two of my most desired features!

The first is support for quote posts. This had already become an unofficial feature in the client apps I was using (phanpy.social on the web and Ivory on iOS) but now it's officially part of Mastodon's core platform.

Much more notably though:

Fetch All Replies: Completing the Conversation Flow

Users on servers running 4.4 and earlier versions have likely experienced the confusion of seeing replies appearing on other servers but not their own. Mastodon 4.5 automatically checks for missing replies upon page load and again every 15 minutes, enhancing continuity of conversations across the Fediverse.

The absolute worst thing about Mastodon - especially if you run on your own independent server - is that the nature of the platform means you can't be guaranteed to see every reply to a post your are viewing that originated on another instance (previously).

This leads to an unpleasant reply-guy effect where you find yourself replying to a post saying the exact same thing that everyone else said... because you didn't see any of the other replies before you posted!

Mastodon 4.5 finally solves this problem!

I went looking for the GitHub issue about this and found this one that quoted my complaint about this from December 2022, which is marked as a duplicate of this Fetch whole conversation threads issue from 2018.

So happy to see this finally resolved.