They’re really leaning into the email similarities here, not a fan of moving the sidebar to the other side but I’ll get over it. My biggest wish on the UI front though is for them to add a threaded view for replies like what Bluesky has, navigating long threads on Mastodon can be really taxing just trying to follow reply chains.

Most Masto-compatible software that’s not Mastodon itself (e.g. Akkoma, Sharkey, Wafrn) support threaded conversations so if you want to be in that part of the Fediverse you can try one of them out.

@onlinepersona@programming.dev

Akkoma only has two instances and they are both down

Sharkey is a Misskey fork and there don’t seem to be any instances. Misskey has instances, but none that I tried actually allow seeing the posts without logging in. To top it off, they all require approval. That is one of my biggest pet peeves with “public” software: requiring a login to even evaluate it.

Wafrn looks kinda interesting. It does require clicking to see every layer of responses and the entire thread isn’t shown like in lemmy, but maybe that’s configurable.

Thanks for sharing. It looks like I’d have to go shopping for the right software in order to get what I want 😅

Akkoma only has two instances and they are both down

Try Fediverse Observer and FediDB, have some more.

Sharkey is a Misskey fork and there don’t seem to be any instances.

Again, try Fediverse Observer and FediDB.

Mastodon doesn’t even really understand threaded conversations on the backend side. It can’t render and display what it doesn’t understand.

That’s also why there’s so much friction between Mastodon on one side and Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte on the other side. All four are based on enclosed, threaded, one-post-many-comments conversations in which all participants in the conversation and everyone who has received the start post always receive all comments (ignores and blocks notwithstanding). Friendica is the only one out of the bunch with no support for FEP-171b “Conversation Containers”.

Would also be nice if they start explicitly treating the threadiverse as groups. This is already doable, but some usability sweeteners would make it much more accessible. It’s an absolute win-win for everyone on the fediverse.

explicitly treating the threadiverse as groups

What do you mean by groups? Are you talking about groups like how they’re described in this fedi.tips article?

Exactly, thanks for sharing the link. The interaction between threadiverse platforms and mastodon (sadly for pixelfed this does not work) is exactly as it is for fedigroups.social or what used to be a.gup.pe.

Mastodon has no sense or support for groups whatsoever.

Mastodon aims to be purist, old-school microblogging. Anything that isn’t purist, old-school microblogging has no place on Mastodon. Not even enclosed threaded conversations. Especially not groups. For Twitter has no groups either.

The result of this is that the huge majority of Mastodon users don’t even know that there are any groups anywhere in the Fediverse. What they can’t see on Mastodon doesn’t exist at all.

FediGroups is kluged Mastodon, but it sells itself to Mastodon users as the only group solution in the Fediverse. And Mastodon users buy it because it’s literally all they know. Come up to FediGroups with something like Friendica or Hubzilla or the Threadiverse, and they’ll still insist that FediGroups is vastly superior to all of them in every way imaginable. As far as I can see, FediGroups was invented by Mastodon users who at that point had never even heard of Friendica or Lemmy, who might even have believed like so many others that the Fediverse equals Mastodon.

On the other hand, Mastodon is rumoured to be working on groups itself. But knowing Mastodon’s track record (as well as Mastodon’s philosophy of trying hard to make the non-Mastodon Fediverse look broken and therefore very undesirable to Mastodon users), we have to expect Mastodon re-inventing the wheel in a way that’s as incompatible with existing wheels and roads as it ever comes.

Thank you for your opinion, it is appreciated.

i’d love for them to implement bsky’s nuclear blocking, hide posts to logged out users, and subscribable block/mute lists, too.

it’d be kind of cool if they natively introduced atproto bridging (with options to toggle it per account, per post, per reply, or per instance).