This is pretty huge news for Mastodon users: As of the next version of Mastodon, comments to a post will not be limited to whatever is federated to your server through indirect means. The whole platform should feel a lot more vibrant after this, and it addresses what has been one of the main complaints about Mastodon.

It is summarized like this by @FediTips@social.growyourown.services:

Some good news about #Mastodon, there has been a very significant bit of code added which will automatically fetch all the replies in a thread. This means everyone will be able to see a thread's whole conversation no matter which server they are on! 🥳

The code has just been "merged" which means it should become available in the next update to Mastodon, hopefully within the next few months.

(Those who want the technical details can see the Pull Request at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615)

I would honestly have been worried if the main people behind the protocol were busy trying to gatekeeep it.

The numbers are down to 1.3M today, which matches Fediverse Observer. So it seems like this was pretty clearly some data problem on the side of Fedidb.

On the positive side, if Fediverse Observer has been consistently correct, the number of monthly active users has increased every month since October last year. So at least there's that.

[oops - wrong thread]