vaguerant

It’s true this is a thing that you can do, but the experience seems pretty degraded vs. just registering an account with a Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks (did I miss any?) instance which is natively configured for the kind of threaded conversations that exist on this segment of the fediverse. The instructions basically amount to “Go to a Lemmy instance and use its interface to find a community you’re interested in, then copy the link to the discussion you want to interact with and paste that into your Mastodon instance’s search bar, then reply to the post that appears. It’s that simple!”

If you only interact with threads occasionally or you just want to try it out from Mastodon, this is workable, but you need a lot of patience for the busywork that’s involved.

My guess is that there’s a bot (or very bored person) monitoring a few major communities and they just DM everybody who posts there. I took a bit of a break from social media a while ago and the first time I commented after that, two fediverse chick DMs. Seems like they are responding to activity.

What a cool service, thanks for sharing. You can also check the Exodus database via web if you can’t or don’t want to install the native Android app.