@kameka@mastodon.social @seachanger@alaskan.social While I agree with your broader point about the Fediverse, I think the invisibility of replies is something specific to how Mastodon (and similar server software like Pleroma, Misskey, and forks thereof) handle federation, but not forced by federation itself.

This can be already mitigated on the microblogging fedi by https://a.gup.pe/ groups that create a bot that boosts everything posted to the group, making sure that everyone subscribed sees all replies. The forum (or reddit-like, as in Lemmy or Kbin) fedi bakes this into the software, by making the communities/magazines act as boosters of all replies. This doesn't work all that well with the microblogging apps, because while the guppe groups are somewhat manageable due to low traffic, if I (for example) subscribed to some moderately lively Beehaw communities, then my home timeline would be Beehaw upon Beehaw and nothing but Beehaw, most of it replies to post I don't care about. It would be nice to have something like an automated "silent boost" that just puts replies in my server for me to read at my own leisure, but not hammering my notifications and home timeline, but I don't know if this is in any way possible.