Mastodon: Fetch whole conversation threads

[drequivalent]

I'm replying to a message on, say, Prismo, and I see this in Mastodon:

Then, I go to Prismo page and see the whole thread:

Turns out, there's a lot more messages in the conversation, and Mastodon shows barely a fraction of it.

This becomes increasingly annoying when replying to extensive threads. It is annoying for people who see the same comments as repolies to their messages (because responders couldn't see other people's messages) and it's annoying for responders themselves - because they don't see where the conversation is going, and what they actually should reply and reply to. This is only going to get worse as more people join Fediverse and threads become longer.

Mastodon (and other social engines for that matter) need a way to fetch the whole threads of the conversation, starting with one post and going forward to replies to this post and replies to replies to this post, recursively.

I don't know, if there's anything to help this defined in the ActivityPub standard (a list of replies to this post as a part of the mets info about the post would be nice to have, I think). @cwebber is there anything like this Mastodon and others can use?

[nightpool]

mastodon already does this for it's own messages by forwarding replies to
subscribers, this is a thing prismo could implement.

On Sat, Dec 1, 2018, 7:16 PM drequivalent [e-mail] wrote:

I'm replying to a message on, say, Prismo, and I see this in Mastodon:

[image: 2018-12-02 03-06-23]
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1463277/49334145-52c5b180-f5df-11e8-8fb7-1e50756b2212.png

Then, I go to Prismo page and see the whole thread:

[image: 92e06f5f-d2da-4e1b-aeb4-6e1a88afce80]
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1463277/49334163-a33d0f00-f5df-11e8-91d4-885a7850cbac.png

Turns out, there's a lot more messages in the conversation, and Mastodon
shows barely a fraction of it.

This becomes increasingly annoying when replying to extensive threads. It
is annoying for people who see the same comments as repolies to their
messages (because responders couldn't see other people's messages) and it's
annoying for responders themselves - because they don't see where the
conversation is going, and what they ctually should reply and reply to.
This is only going to get worse as more people join Fediverse and threads
become longer.

Mastodon (and other social engines for that matter) need a way to fetch
the whole threads of the conversation, starting with one post and going
forward to replies to this post and replies to replies to this post,
recursively.

I don't know, if there's anything to help thin defined in the ActivityPub
standard (a list of replies to this post as a part of the mets info about
the post would be nice to have, I think). @cwebber
https://github.com/cwebber is there anything like this Mastodon and
others can use?

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[nightpool]

(because of the way ActivityPub works, it falls on Prismo to "notify" subscribers of relevant messages. i would suggest that you suggest the feature to them)

[trwnh]

This is what the replies collection should be used for. Mastodon currently only includes self-replies, but it should be possible to fetch a Mastodon status using the ActivityPub JSON and see the valid replies. Currently this is only possible with the Mastodon API.

Example post from me, which only advertises 1 reply (also from me): https://mastodon.social/users/trwnh/statuses/99093644445157168/replies

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[trwnh]

This could still be done as a "force-refresh" functionality