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The UI makes it look like a centralized system. That fiction fails in many subtle and silent ways that make the experience feel off and very difficult to reason about.
Let's say there's a really insightful comment on a post and I make a comment referencing it. Then I get a bunch of bizarre replies that miss the point so badly that I wonder if they're bots. Or maybe they speak a different language and they're reading everything in Mastodon's awful translation.
But actually it's none of those things, it's really because those users aren't reading the same set of comments that I'm reading. The conversation doesn't make sense if we're not actually reading the same thread.
Why don't we all see the same thread? Because we follow different people, and we're on different servers, and not all comments exist on every server.
It might be an interesting distributed-systems design challenge, but the user interface makes it appear we're all in the same conversation when we're not.
It's nearly impossible for one user to diagnose what another user isn't seeing, or what another user is talking about but I can't see.
The UI attempts to hide this, to make it appear like we're all having the same conversation, leading to these weird and uncanny situations where the abstraction leaks and you don't know it's leaking.
Social media comments are enough of a nightmare already, and now Mastodon has added stochastic threads that are different for every participant in the conversation.
And that in a nutshell is my experience with everything Mastodon :)
After years the issue is still open and makes the first impression of a lot of users pretty bad.