Can you see off-instance replies to a post yet? How about quote toot? Thse are unfair questions, because I know the answer to them, but it demonstrates why Ma

Can you see off-instance replies to a post yet? How about quote toot? Thse are unfair questions, because I know the answer to them, but it demonstrates why Mastodon is unfit for the kind of chatter that Twitter excelled at and Bluesky is trying to inherit. You can't overhear stuff on Mastodon, and that has two chilling factors: one, it makes it feel like a deep echoing well unless you follow everybody you might want to talk to (thus making your signal-to-noise ratio plummet; Twitter was always better with fewer follows, so long as they engaged with people you didn't follow too--Bluesky is similar), and two, it encourages reply-guying because your Very Thoughtful Response doesn't look like it's been preempted. Bluesky owns, actually, because they get that shitposting is the fun part of social media, and they built a thing that's good for it. They've made mistakes--quite a few of them--but they have the core of something that the Mastodon developers and ActivityPub standardization folks more generally really should look at. Because, as it stands, when you evangelize for "the fediverse", you're asking people who expect one thing to come to an offering that is drastically less of That Thing (in the good ways; much less so the bad) than the one from which they left.