@tindall Microblogging gives me a space to drop thoughts without much care for form or structure. It's convenient and mostly entertaining for consumption, but I don't really like it. It's fire-and-forget outbound, and inbound is a disconnected random stream.

Most forums I used were small communities built around a topic, moderately active. It was hard to stay when you lost connection to the main topic.

Funny you mention G+ - for all its failures, it was a good place between forums and blogs.

@galaxis @tindall

I frequently encounter that all interesting discussion on #mastodon really needs a forum. Below is the hierarchy of a recent discussion I had, and it has more than 30 parallel branches. Manage that. Plus in a week time it is all forgotten history.

Follow

@humanetech

incidentally this sort of a map at the top level of a post would actually be a great way to navigate it. Hover to see a preview, highlight whatever node you are reading at the time as you click through it.

@galaxis @tindall@cybre.space

@humanetech @freemo @galaxis @tindall @ColinTheMathmo @Chartodon

Definitely! An earlier step in the process is for a server to traverse such a tree and solve this simpler problem: github.com/magicstone-dev/ecko

A navigable graph UI would be super cool!

@freemo @humanetech @galaxis @tindall I recall a Usenet client having such an overview at the top of your post, a bit like the branches in a git repository - although it's been decades, so I might slightly misremember.

Actually, a git-like view might work quite well to give you an idea of where you are in the convo. It'd be a client-side thing, though.

@doenietzomoeilijk Classic news readers - and mail clients - would build the tree from metadata in the posts (Message-ID: and References: on Usenet, maybe with the Subject as a fallback). Not sure how ActivityPub handles this, but I think it seemed quite similar in principle.

@freemo @humanetech @tindall

Sign in to participate in the conversation
CleverLibre Social

CleverLibre Social is an inclusive social instance for open discussion, learning, and community.
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.