That's probably going to leave people with the impression that JS is required. Sure, there are desktop clients (all third party) and I could probably try those, but generally the kinds of people who'd run random code on their systems and give it network access will probably just have JS enabled by default in the first place. At least some are open source I guess.
Looking at some of the the open source projects I was amused to find a client for MS-DOS (https://github.com/SuperIlu/DOStodon) and then amused again to see all the .js files it needs to work. It looks like it might take a little work to find a desktop client that doesn't just run a bunch of javascript anyway
Due to the federated nature of Mastodon every other instance is ostensibly an archive as there is currently no way to guarantee that a tweet/comment/account is removed from remote instances when you delete it from your local instance.
So, parity to unauthenticated Twitter browsing.
You can add /embed on the end to see the singular post without replies, but it's not really a good substitute.
GH issues:
I don't know why it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't.