I can confirm that if a Mastodon user *does* want to play nice with replying, there is a way and it's not that hard.

I cleared out the automatic @ things from my reply before I started typing these messages and everything seems hunky-dory.

I suspect that everything still works if if you remove the @ list.

It's a manual step though so even if it does work, it probably won't happen much: people have to know about it, remember it, AND ALSO be bothered to do it.

What's the story with Simple Tools? Did the maintainer quit or something?