I think Mastodon should also copy twitter's move of separating "who is in this reply to?" into metadata rather that all of the @ mention handle stuff. Especially since the handles get long with the server domain in there. It's unwieldy and unfriendly.
And it's weird. Like, if you're having a normal conversation with someone and you say their name first every time you speak, that's be odd. And if you both do it back and forth.....?
I see that when I replied to myself just now, it didn't do that. Maybe I'm just not getting something?
@mattdm there's enough metadata to know what is a reply to what. Mastodon mostly decided notification/visibility based on mentions.
AP itself has all the to, cc, bcc and whatnot
So I should just get in the habit backspacing people's handles when I start a reply, and encourage others to as well? Is there a downside?
@KuJoe
huh. I guess that makes sense — but leaves the problem. I saw someone reply to me with a new line before the actual message and I'm going to copy that — it seems a little nicer at least.
Maybe like this even? Not sure. :)
This method is nice, but it uses up 10 characters right off the bat for your username (probably varies based on username/instance domain length).
I was thinking the new line method + an icon of some sort just to keep it organized and without looking like a formal letter.
Maybe like:
@mattdm↩️
Hello Matthew!
I'd probably abandon the idea after a day or as soon as I start replying on mobile. 🤣
@KuJoe @mattdm I would naively think, as someone who has breezed through ActivityPub docs but never implemented any part of it, that it ought to generate `bcc` / `bto` in that case and still show up in notifications, but I haven't read the source, and believe you that it doesn't have that impact for whatever reason....
@KuJoe @mattdm Yes. I prefer this. Sometimes you end up on a Twitter thread with dozens of participants and you get flooded by notifications nobody ever meant to send. With #Mastodon, it's easy to remove people from notifications. (It's also very necessary for direct messages, given the mention determines whether the person receives a copy. It would be messy to have two different mention systems for public and private messages.)
@mattdm I just checked this and discovered if you remove the name from the beginning of the reply it doesn't show the reply in their notifications/mentions. Not a huge deal if you're following a discussion closely but if somebody replies to you a week from now and removes your name from it I'm guessing you might not see it.