@trwnh yes, that's correct. But if you use the Mastodon API, it searches the local server for posts in the same conversation, so you get conversation fragmentation. Using AP to get the `replies` collection will get all direct replies (and you can get the full tree by getting the replies of each of those, and so on). It's a way to hack around fragmentation.
@evan i think most mastodon clients don’t want to parse “raw” activitystreams in addition to parsing mastodon api responses. the closest they’ll come to that is requesting the public mastodon api endpoint for the root statuses/:id/context (which is maybe “more complete” but not guaranteed to be “fully complete” either — if some downstream replies drop the root server, then they wont be included) (also the mastodon api limits context to 4096 total entries and gets inefficient long before then)