Proposed: it is completely, utterly, gobsmackingly horrible that Mastodon users - even smart, highly engaged ones that read documentation and understand federation - *cannot tell* just who is going to be shown what they post or what the various privacy settings mean in practice.
There is an animated conversation going on in the comments of the poll I just posted where we're trying to reverse engineer under what circumstances a comment reply will show up in the commenter's followers' timelines.
That this conversation even exists is, I'm sorry, completely horrifying. The fact that this is even a matter of discussion, to say nothing of needing to be a matter of speculation and investigation, is appalling.
How can anybody make informed decisions about participating on a platform, the behavior which they do not understand and cannot predict?
For instance,
I wonder how many Mastodon users out there think the comments they are leaving on other people's posts are populating their timeline.
From time to time when people follow me, I check them out to see if they're someone I want to follow back. It's not uncommon for me to see an account that has, like, all of three top level posts, all of which have been made more than a month ago; their replies tab may show that they're quite active recently.
I generally regard those accounts pretty much the same as somebody who has no posts at all. I don't follow back ciphers. Most people don't.
At least I know to check the replies tab; pretty sure a lot of people it doesn't occur to them to see if an account that doesn't seem to have any activity might have an active replies tab.
Unless somebody looking at your profile knows to click through to your replies, if you only reply and don't top post, your account looks like a ghost account, because there's nothing in your timeline.
@siderea I think it's sometimes the case that I only see people's posts that have reached my instance. So if they only just showed up because someone on my instance followed them, I may only see a handful of posts even if they have a long history on their own server.
(Unless I'm misunderstanding.)
@WomanCorn Oh I'm talking about even when you click all the way through to the person's profile on their own server, and you still see only a handful of posts.
Now it's still possible that this person recently migrated to that server, and they've lost their post history because you can't migrate posts (a separate rant).
But it's pretty clear some people just don't top post very much. Or really at all.