Accidentally found earlier today you can follow communities/magazines as “group”-tagged users in Mastodon, e.g. https://mastodon.social/@fediverse@lemmy.world
The problem is that posts in the community appear as boosts on Mastodon, and even replies are treated as posts. So if you follow a community with high engagement there, your feed easily gets flooded by replies people make to a given post.
Hope that helps _
Friendica handles that situation well, because it treats the top most post/comment that it’s aware of as the parent, and then any replies as children, and then it only ever displays the parent. You can then sort your timeline to either show the parents in the order they were posted, or by the order of most recent activity.
Either way, 100 replies to a parent post means it still only appears once in your timeline.
The way Friendica does timelines is something I wish more micro blogging activitypub platforms would implement.
That’s something that’s been bothering me on the microblogging side of Mbin too, how replies to posts are presented. There, all replies appear on the feed, and they’re also on a parallel code block to the post, so even browser scripts or filters have trouble picking them.
Your comment gives me some ideas, so will be poking on the Mbin issues tracker later. Thanks! _
Yeah, don’t do that.
You can follow PieFed users on Mastodon though - put the url of their profile into the search on Mastodon then click follow.
auster@thebrainbin.org you’re right, the experience is definitely sub-par, and it’s because both Mastodon and the Threadiverse use the
Announceactivity for different purposes.Mastodon uses it to boost posts to the feed (overriding existing logic re: replies being suppressed), and the Threadiverse uses it to keep different instances up to date.
It could be made better in that when a group actor announces a reply, Mastodon doesn’t promote it to the feed. Not sure if that’s easy to do.
