PSA: if you see a remote toot and think "wow that is an amazing toot, why does it have 0 favs/boosts/replies"? It probably doesn't. It's just that nobody from this instance follows someone who fav'ed/boosted/replied to it.
One thing I found useful is to just eagerly follow people you see in the Federated timeline saying stuff you like. You can always unfollow/block later.
The Masto experience gets fleshed out the more you use an instance. Keep in mind toot.cafe is 4 days old. 😄
@nolan Is there any feature to just have whitelist connections to just a set of known instances?
@ramlmn Yes, admins can either blacklist or whitelist entire instances. I believe Eugen has said this feature will eventually come to user accounts as well.
@nolan I imagine that if Mastodon takes off, there'll be services that aggregate boosts/favs, and I could see a place for aggregating boosts/favs from connected instances.
The idea of different instances having different cultures is really interesting, but managing identities across multiple isn't ideal still.
@nolan
Mastotip: You can click on the time of the post to open it on the posters instance and thus see everything they see. This also makes you see the whole thread so you don't miss out on replies.
@pajn Yes that's a good point; there is always an escape hatch to the "full" view. My point is more that the UI doesn't put it front-and-center. But yes, you can seek it out if you want. 🙂
@nolan
Just a tip to new users, was not meant to you :)
I also like that it defaults to a view filtered collectively by all of us on 🎺.☕
@rauschma @pajn I believe there are technical reasons it doesn't. If my URL bar says toot.cafe, I'm getting data from toot.cafe server, which hasn't started "following" those people yet. Hence the need to switch context.
OTOH this may be fixable presuming CORS is set up on the remote site and the local frontend can just fetch fresh data from the remote server, but I'm not sure.
@nolan @rauschma
I guess it would as you can force the server to pull a specific toot by pasting the URL in the search bar, a thread isn't that different. But that would expose much more content that doesn't follow your instances COC. I can be reasonably confident that other users on this instance agrees with and mostly follows others that mostly agrees with the COC
@nolan you are my first follow....based on this toot
@Kirbstr Hah, thanks. 🙂 I'll do a follow-back.
It's like old Twitter! I just want to pound the follow button all the time. 😂
@nolan the cool thing about old twitter was the the early adopters were almost all awesome. Or maybe I just like early adopters.
@Kirbstr Yes that's a good point; I expect this will change once Mastodon becomes more popular and it's not just all early adopters. But in the heady early days, gosh if it isn't fun! 😄
@nolan also it doesn't show in the timelines, toot have to look at the individual posts.
@nolan I'm very sorry if my bot just sent you some random spam, that's my bad. I told it to reply to a mention instead of a user and I guess this toot just happened to match my ID?
And yes, this means you might not be seeing the "full" data on a toot from across the whole Fediverse. My justification for this is:
1. Masto UI doesn't put emphasis on boosts/favs; you don't even see it in the list view. So no more prejudging a post based on how many of your friends approve/disapprove of it.
2. Every instance has its own culture, and some cultures are shockingly different. Maybe we don't need to know what the Nazi instances had to say in response to that toot. Just sayin'.