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Yes, it’s up to each user how he names the URLs he’s following.

This makes it hard to implement global @replies, therefore there’s no recommend way of handling those at the moment. You could just write "@<NICK>:" and hope that the person you had in mind follows you and feels concerned.

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I see. So by default all @mentions show up on all followers' timeline, just like regular tweets?

Yes, because there is no difference between an @reply and an ordinary tweet. Not technically at least. It’s just text. But implementing a filter on your side should be trivial if that’s what you want.

Maybe I’ll implement something which makes it easy for users to specify custom filters and/or highlights.

Given the decentralized nature, it'd be nice to parse any @reply , add metadata that indicates the full URL, and thus translate into a local user's nicknames.

Should be easy to add metadata by convention inside the messages, appended to them following some kind of control string, like "META". Clients could interpret anything from that string on by rules yet to be defined.

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