I don't think it's going to be "fixed" since the workaround is like 2 clicks/taps and the opposite would potentially overload servers, especially ones like yours or mine with only a single user.🤷‍♂️

It might seem annoying, but I'd much rather have to click a couple things than to not be able to run the instance at all because of data costs.

Unless they can figure out some way to do it without DDOSing the servers, it probably won't happen.

Nostr has the same issue, it's just not very apparent. If someone is on a different relay than you, and neither of your relays are "firehose" relays, then you won't see each other's comments either.

I've had that issue a few times before they started saving the relay info cryptographically with the private keys. When I'd go to different apps that I used different relays with, certain people wouldn't show.

The very least I would like to see are up to date posts by people I follow. Your instance should be responsible to keep your followers up-to-date. It would put the same load on your instance as publishing a post.
This issue has been open for 6 years and nothing has improved, so I agree with you that it's never gonna get fixed: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9409

What do you mean with 2 clicks? Does your app have a feature to fetch remote replies?

Fetch whole conversation threads · Issue #9409 · mastodon/mastodon

I'm replying to a message on, say, Prismo, and I see this in Mastodon: Then, I go to Prismo page and see the whole thread: Turns out, there's a lot more messages in the conversation, and Mastodon s...

^GitHub

my instance does pull replies and posts from everyone I follow. I didn't know we were talking about that.

I thought we were talking about replies and such from people we don't follow.😬