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.
