@badrihippo @ted yeah the main tech problem is that Mastodon does not distinguish between

"@-example hello"

and

"hello @-example"

so the main thing that it uses to tell if something is a reply is, essentially, if it is threaded. An originating post like "@-example hi" is not threaded so it counts as just a normal post everyone can see.

I don't agree with this but I also understand that doing a regex to detect a leading @ probably has a lot of unintended consequences you have to check for