You know how when you're the first one to subscribe to a community in an instance and you only get the first handful of posts? Imagine that for nearly every post you come across.

Also authorized fetch / secure mode not being completely implemented by Lemmy means some responses might not be making it through here as well.

In addition to instances on both ends of the software gap that may be misconfigured in a way the other can't make sense of.

The mastodon interface doesn't show the threading of a conversation, so it's super easy to get lost as to what's a reply to what. As a result, a mastodon reply to a thread can often be made at an arbitrary point and without really having a grasp on what else has been said and why, because it's all just presented in flattened feed.