I just went through hell trying to respond to a message that came to me through the gateway between WordPress and Mastodon. I get an email from WordPress saying someone talked about me. I clicked the link, it took me to a WordPress dialog, very confusing, but there was a link to the message, so I clicked it, which took me to a Mastodon past, where there was a bit of (correct) snark, from a longtime friend. So I clicked Reply, and then got the dialog that says basically you have to go somewhere else to reply to this. And I understand why it is this way. They did the best they could for a protocol that was designed that wasn’t appropriate for a distributed system. At some point you have to be dispassionate about this. We wanted a self-driving car, but it can’t drive itself. What you do, in product design, is start off with something you can do, and build out from there. If you work backwards, this is the kind of system you get. I’ve actually been through this a few times so these things obvious to me. The spec isn’t the important thing. You do that after you have the software running and usable and lovely enough. Keep the hellish flows out.