So I know that there are some limitations for federation, especially if you are on a smaller instance. On Mastodon I stumble upon this problem on a daily basis. Here is an example. My account is on a smaller local instance (social.cologne) and in the following picture is a post of Eugen Rochko (which I follow):
https://imgur.com/a/Fkj3ZY9
As you can see there appears to be 0 likes and 0 boosts, below are 2 conmments (not pictured). As far as I understand this is a result of federation. My instance only tracks likes and boost of my instance (and people who are followed on my instance) and as a result his post seems to be not popular at all.
Too see every interaction I would have to visit the original post on Eugens instance (https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/112574727273953783). Currently there are 6 boosts and 64 favorites on this post, with 4 replies below.
Last year I stumbled upon an android app that is able to show me the full interactions without visiting the source instance manually (https://github.com/tooot-app).
This is how I see Eugens post in my timeline
https://imgur.com/a/BFdcdSI
(Same as official app) and when i click on it to see the replies, the full content is shown.
https://imgur.com/a/shddfEK
I'm assuming that the app is loading the full content manually - just like if you would open the source instance.
Shouldn't this behaviour be the default - even in the main mastodon app? If I where to only use the official app I would miss most of the interactions and content (from people my instance doesnt know about). There are other examples where you would see replies to posts that allegedly don't exists. Only with Tooot I can see the rest of the conversation.
The tooot app didn't see any updates for some time... Are there any other apps that show full interactions right away as well?
I can only assume that the issue is that they're trying to reduce the number of calls to the original instance. If you're just scrolling by, you only see the post that's cached on your own server, and it doesn't communicate with the original instance until you open the post. Making it so that every time some scrolls by a post it contacts the original instance sounds like it massively increases the amount of traffic to the original instance which goes against the idea of software that supports smaller, self or community hosted servers.