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Chris Trottier

🚨 MASTODON NOW HAS COMMENT THREADING! 🚨

This makes following a conversation much easier, especially in long threads with many participants.

It's a major usability improvement, and makes Mastodon much easier to use.

mastodon.social has comment threading right now, and only on the native web. This feature should be available on other servers and clients with a future update.

See screenshot as an example.

How do you feel about the addition of this feature?

@fediversenews

@tauon Nope, this is a new development.

@atomicpoet@mastodon.social @fediversenews@venera.social I am a huge fan. It has been confusing for me for quite a while and this is clarity.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews Has this been checked into main? Or is it a custom implementation for now?

@neatchee @fediversenews This is available on mastodon.social, which uses nightly builds. It will eventually find its way to other servers.

@atomicpoet Ah, nightly builds, so it's already merged to main. We run bleeding edge so I'm gonna merge it over soon :3 Probably needs significant work to make it work with the glitch-soc flavour though :\

@atomicpoet @fediversenews any idea how this appears and interacts with the likes of pleroma/akkoma/etc ?

@atomicpoet @fediversenews I'll reserve judgement to when it gets deployed in my instance. Can you collapse subthreads for higher legibility?

@oblomov As far as I can tell, the threads aren't collapsible.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews Always nice to have new functionality like that. Just hope it's compatible with other #ActivityPub services supporting such a feature.

@Bigou @atomicpoet @fediversenews Well, @elk has been doing this the whole time, so I'm sure it's just a client feature. No server changes necessary.

@steve @Bigou @fediversenews @elk That’s right. Many clients have had this feature for awhile. @phanpy does it very well.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews

Retrofitting such features in an existing project usually does not work well. It did not work on Twitter. Will it work on Mastodon?

The only decent conversation threading I have seen so far is the tree-based display of Reddit. In fact Reddit's is the best social network UI I have seen. Why didn't Mastodon copy it from the start? Why did it choose to (badly) imitate Twitter instead?

@JorgeStolfi @atomicpoet @fediversenews
Do Reddit posts scroll up the right way? It's backwards on Mastodon. You see the bottom of the post first and need to keep scrolling to get to the title. Isn't that crazy?

@ianp5a @atomicpoet @fediversenews ]

You can choose the ordering of comments and sub-comments. The default may be newest-first, but I set mine to newest-last.

With premium subscription you get a few more features, like highlighting of comments and sub-comments you have not read yet -- in each subreddit and thread.

Threads (the top-level topics) list is always newest-first, however.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews looking forward to trying it out! Should definitely make following conversations a lot easier if it works well.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews In favor. But perhaps I’m biased since working with KOM systems. We stripped quoted sections from the post that was replied to when importing from other systems. In KOM they were not needed and only reduced readability. Way to go!

@atomicpoet@mastodon.social @fediversenews@venera.social What, has base mastodon been completely linear all this time?

How in the world do Mastodon users even read threads with more than three people?

@privateger @atomicpoet @fediversenews i print out every reply and hang them from the ceiling with pieces of string. then by walking around the room looking up at the posts i can figure out that theres a lot of comments on the post.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews

Is there an API change involved or is it just a UI improvement?

@elk has their own implementation that works pretty well, so concerned that any API change might break them.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews @elk

Duh. Realized the API is probably version tagged, so if a change, clients continue to use the old for a time until upgraded.

@atomicpoet
i lost my nap.
this, from my brother, was part of the reason why, which may explain whatever whenever you wish.

"My mail has a 'recently deleted' folder where
deleted emails aggregate before their
ultimate dissolution, which could be the name
of a garage band, a game show, a blues song,
or the new name for the party of the
Pathetically Un-empathetic Texas Zeros,
or PUTZ...and that represents a tangent,
not a dangling farticiple.
:@)>"

@atomicpoet
Looks good. I want new shiny. Any sense of how close to release this might be?

@atomicpoet @fediversenews While it’s a good idea to try something like that (I honestly need time with it to figure out my personal
opinion) it does worry me a bit that it’s pushed out so quickly in one place first.

A coordinated release let’s say 2 or 4 weeks later giving clients and servers a chance to release it at the same time would have been preferable.

I do support diverse apps on the fediverse, but this is a big version mess waiting to happen. Hmm.

@atomicpoet @fediversenews You sneaky:) Somehow I reacted to (and replied to) your post before I realize what 🥖🗑️ was in the screenshot :)

@atomicpoet Nice to see. Will make reading comments much easier.

Now the next thing, would be for the interface to recognize a thread, and show me the first post in my timeline, and not all the other posts that are the thread. So annoying when I read chronologically, and dive into one of your threads, and then still have to scroll past all the parts 2-29 you posted in my timeline...