I really want the ability to write my own comment when I boost a post here on Mastodon. Sometimes, I want to disagree with something and provide context, and making a screenshot of a post is a hassle. I suspect this feature was left out on purpose. That purpose was probably to let users maintain control over the framing of their content, which I expect is something people didn't like about retweets on Twitter.
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Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com)'s status on Friday, 19-Apr-2019 16:28:09 EDT
Don Romano (alt)
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Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com)'s status on Friday, 19-Apr-2019 16:35:11 EDT
Don Romano (alt)
But removing the ability to write your own text on a post that you reshare doesn't give control back to the original poster. In fact, it rdeuces control, because it increases the likeliness of other people sharing screenshots of it instead, at which point you are unable to see it, and are also unable to delete it. Granted, having the feature doesn't prevent that from happening, but it definitely makes it less likely, since it's much easier to just hit the boost icon, type a text and post it.
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Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com)'s status on Friday, 19-Apr-2019 16:40:49 EDT
Don Romano (alt)
As for replies: They don't work very well.
Firstly, the original post isn't propagated across the network to everyone the reply is propagated to, leaving the reply dangling without context for many people.
Secondly, it's not always evident in the timeline feed whether a post is a reply or just a mention, and if you want to check that, you will have to expand it, and due to the issue above, proceed to view the thread on the originating instance.
That's just not what people do.
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Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com)'s status on Friday, 19-Apr-2019 16:43:37 EDT
Don Romano (alt)
TL;DR: Mastodon is severely broken in many ways.
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