Just paste the URL of the thread into the box at the top and hit the "linear thread view" button below and it will give you a view of the thread with hierarchical replies sorted by how many engagements they got (reposts + favourites + replies).
It's very early days so it doesn't yet show any images, the design is not ideal, not optimised for mobile, etc. But I already find this useful for getting a feel of big threads.
My aim here is to give people a better way to navigate overwhelmingly large threads and to allow for a sort of archive of interesting threads. If we want to make Mastodon into a viable option for having scientific debates (e.g. alternative to peer review), we need some way to make them more accessible to outsiders and to surface the most interesting and relevant content.
So I'm particularly interested in hearing suggestions for features or other ideas on how to display threads in the context of long lasting discussions with some permanence to them.
At the moment it's just a very simple idea, but I have other ideas for how to display threads that are a bit wackier and I'll add these as extra buttons as and when I work on this. I'm also going to see how feasible it is to make this into a bookmarklet so you can just hit the 'render thread' bookmark in your browser and open a tab with this. Should be straightforward.
@neuralreckoning
Point being we can work these ideas in together - interface improvements like this (even if we want to keep them as overlays) as well as ways to mark certain threads as "sticky" and float them above other "regular" posts in a profile view, like existing sticky posts but with a more bloglike appearance and the ability to have instancewide stickies so its more forumlike :)
@jonny@neuralreckoning I’d prefer if most work was client-side or upstream. Per-instance features are kind of annoying, eg coming across mathstodon posts where LaTeX won’t render unless I view them on mathstodon directly. The more the instances diverge, the harder it is for new folks to decide what to join.
Obviously, instances are a great place to experiment. But I just don’t want it to be the endgame…
@jni @neuralreckoning
I think the instances being different from one another is really good! One of the strengths of the fedi. If we prioritized sameness for the ease of joining then wed just all be using base mastodon. Pulling code upstream to base masto is notoriously difficult and slow. IMO People should explore different instances, and we should be better about signposting their differences and swapping code horizontally. We try our best over here: https://wiki.neuromatch.social/Mastodon/Hacking
In this case I dont see the need to make it either/or - we can embed something that also can be used as one would a website (going to a website == using this tool as is == viewing a post on another instance)
@neuralreckoning
This is rly nice tho. Try decreasing indenting by half for mobile? Eventually would want to have a system for reflowing text as u scroll to deeper indentations bc its sorta weird to 2d scroll on mobile but I like what ya got going here and think we should do something like this for the instance web interface
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