@nightpool per oldschool email and etc logo, threaded means nested, as opposed to flat clients. As in, capable of representing the thread's actual underlying structure visually.

@cwebber i get your point but dude, email is *fifty years old*

@nightpool sounds like it had a lot of time to establish some terms, then! ;)

@cwebber @nightpool activitypub is just email over json anyway

@kaniini I haven't!

@gamehawk @cwebber

you (Karen C) are spot on

in the old days there were First Class and Telefinder

They were BBS systems that used to run on Macintoshes (before MacOsX)

They could run embedded in a GUI only, as it should be

They were waaay better than anything I see today

The freedom number 1 (to run the program) was absolutely guaranteed

And @nightpool this is a screenshot of MacSoup, an email and newgroups client back then

Now tose are threaded conversations !
https://www.google.com/search?q=macsoup&client=firefox-b-ab&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=8laH016ky3DhUM%253A%252C-Q22qvmGomIVQM%252C_&usg=__f0lDUPjDB_-NhhizEPLLMhSvw3E%3D&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjd89z619PbAhWMvhQKHdzED1AQ9QEIOTAC&biw=1280&bih=623#imgrc=8laH016ky3DhUM:

@catonano @gamehawk @nightpool Many email clients do a good job, especially mu4e and gnus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gnus-reading-news.png

I've thought about adding an activitypub method for gnus. That would be a heck of an entertaining thing to have.

@cwebber @gamehawk @nightpool

maybe they do a good job but making them run is a challenge

Eudora was an icon: you clicked it and the window popped up

They may grant the freedoms number 2, 3 and 4 but the freedom number 1 (to run the program) is severely restricted !!

at the time using an email client didn't require to be a system administrator !

@cwebber @gamehawk @nightpool

gnus ? Oh God

After about 20 years of disperate research I finallly found a decent guide to conffigure it

But I lost my motivation in the meantime

I'll stick to the gmail interface

The qualty of the experience matters !

It is ACTUAL freedom !
Thhe first one !!

@cwebber @gamehawk @nightpool

Chris, it's not personal of course,

I am elaborating my own personal take to software freedom, these days

@catonano Do you have a list of these freedoms that you keep referring to by numbers? Are the numbers well established/known? I tried googling for them with GNU but didn't find a relevant list, but I might've searched the wrong thing.

@catonano nevermind, I found it: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#f1

@gamehawk @cwebber @nightpool

then came twitter and redefined the threaded conversations idea to make it more prone to "engagement" and less to thoughts

this is where we are today

@gamehawk @cwebber @nightpool

I still sorely miss Eudora, the best email client ever.

The quality of the experience has been consistently worsening since "the web"

@nightpool flat is better than nested for shallow things, but you won't survive traversing deep things as well in flatland

consider how this affects the quality of The Discourse!

@cwebber @nightpool so... basically reddit, then?

@trwnh @cwebber yeah i look at reddit and HN and I kind of marvel on the claim that threaded vs flat models affect discussion as much as people claim they do

@nightpool @trwnh It may not make people nicer, but I'll say this: there are some reddit / lobsters / hacker news threads that I've read that there's *no way* you could have conversations about in a flat interface. Because people break off into subtopics... and if you look at something like flat news comments on some very popular blogs and news sites, there's sometimes no way to follow the conversation at all... and even if you can, it's usually because topics are grouped at least 1 level deep

@cwebber @nightpool Sounds more like a display issue than a structural issue. They're both trees, you're just showing branch depth in slightly different ways. If you take the indent out, there's basically no difference. And indents don't really scale (see: tumblr reblog chains over 20 posts)

In a more *practical* sense, it helps to have 1) an indicator of the parent, and 2) collapsibility of branches from any node.

@nightpool @trwnh When you end up with the 1 level deep conversations and you have 200 comments, there's no way to make sense of it. Were you replying to someone 130 posts ago? Well how the hell can you tell?

Instead it devolves into "shouting soup". Shout your way to the top.... and I hate that.

@cwebber @trwnh

anyway, another way to look at it (cf. irc, wikipedia, bulletin boards) is that you're subsuming yourself in and to a broader conversational flow. it's a more collectivist way of looking at it, sure, but communication is something that only exists between people.

It would be just as rude for 2 people to keep arguing about the finer minutia of grammar in an irc where 50 people are trying to discuss music as it would be in "threaded" mailing lists—one just papers over the problem better

@nightpool @trwnh It's true that if people start arguing on a subthread that it's annoying, but also easy to be contained.

But the reason for subthreading isn't just to contain arguments. Have you ever been to a gathering with a lot of people? You might meet three people who turn out to be interested in the same thing, and you go off and talk about it together in a friendly way. It doesn't matter to most people so you don't require the whole room to join you, but those who are interested can

@cwebber @nightpool This is really more to do with dropping mentions of everyone except the direct parent.

@nightpool @cwebber @trwnh it's only rude because MLs are usually topic specific places, and they usually request that you stay on topic. On random threads on reddit, much less microblog/tumbleblog threads, I wouldn't consider it rude

@nightpool @cwebber @trwnh and sometimes just "papering over" is all you need

@nightpool @trwnh The problem with hacker news and reddit isn't the threaded interface (which *does* help a lot), it's smarmy techbro culture. And Reddit wasn't always as bad as it is today: 10y ago it was a lot more calm STEM conversations. Had a lot of the inherent privelege problems of that domain, but I'd consider it considerably less toxic today. (And many subreddits are not as bad, but anything on the homepage is a disaster... that wasn't always true.) Not sure how to scale good culture

@cwebber @trwnh i do appreciate the way you didn't thread these replies

@nightpool @trwnh Well Mastodon's web interface doesn't expose the threads so I'm limited to the UX of the application I'm using ;)

@nightpool @trwnh Btw, notably StatusNet removed threading-by-default in StatusNet 1.0 and it was widely considered a bad move by users. It was one of several things that lead to a huge user exodus.

@cwebber @trwnh "what current users like" does not equal "an overall good experience"

@nightpool @trwnh Sure I agree with that, I'm just giving a data point against what I think is the popular conception of the very point you're making... that current users *want* a flat interface. Whereas I think the reality is that current users want what they currently know and are familiar with... so if introduced to something different, they will usually revolt. So maybe a more useful perspective is: what pros and cons structurally are there?

@cwebber @trwnh it does! you just have to click around a little bit. it's pretty easy to build a mental map of the convo once you're used to it :P

@nightpool @trwnh With 200+ comments? I don't buy it. I've seen 200+ comment threads on threaded interfaces I could easily follow where people could reply to each other from way earlier in the thread. It takes a *ton of* work to do that in a flat interface, and sometimes is near impossible