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?

@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.