SEANK.H.LIAO

mastodon app

why is it so hard to read reply chains

app for mastodon

So I have a mastodon account: @seankhliao@hachyderm.io (I don't use it too much). A while ago I finally got onto Bluesky as well: as @seankhliao.com. The first thing I immediately noticed about the Bluesky app was: it was more of a Twitter clone than mastodon ever was.

The second thing I noticed was the lines and indenting of reply chains. Following allow which tweet was a reply to what was always kind of hard with Twitter, but somewhat doable as you sort of pivoted along each tweet. Up to now, I had been using the official Mastodon app, but I knew from the start that its display of nested replies was confusing. Finally, I have some time to look at the competition, I'll be looking at Android apps, the ones I found were:

From the looks of it, only Fedilab and Trunks show threaded replies well, and of the two, I prefer Trunks since it handles deeper nesting better. The tradeoff is that a long self chain looks weird as it indents a level every time, but I think it's ok for now.