When viewing a feed or a community, you can view either the posts or the comments.
These comments are presented in a flattened "Chat room" style structure with replies and parents disconnected.
Having always thought that kbin provided a microblogging interface like mastodon, I've only recently worked out (though I might be wrong) that it's actually a microblogging-like view of conversations in their communities.
That is, it's a "comments" view that isn't flattened but retains comment threads. Which is something we could do here.
Not entirely sure we would want it or that it should be done, but my immediate reaction is that it might actually be nice, especially for getting a sort of "birds eye" view of what's happening in a relatively focused community.
The unit of such a view would be, as I see it, top level comments to posts, presented with all replies in a indented/hierarchical format. Which is exactly the same as the view of the comments to a post, including all of the sorting options at the top.
So, a "threaded comments" view of a whole feed or community would simply be the merge of all of the comment views of all posts in the feed or community.
This seems viable (without knowing the technical details of implementing it).
Thoughts??
Yea it was hard to explain what I was talking about ... basically any time you can select between viewing "posts" or viewing "comments", which is available for the feeds such as "All" or "Subscribed" or the view of a community. These "comments" sections, as you point it, are different from the other comments sections under specific posts which are, as you say, always threaded (unless "Chat" view is selected).
Two more examples of such "flat comments" views that might be worth threading are the inbox and the user profile.
The inbox, when displaying "replies" is essentially a flat comments view, but could maybe benefit from displaying the replies within the context of the thread they belong in, or at least their parent or all of their parents. I know that whenever I read a reply from the inbox I often navigate back to the post/thread to make sure I remember the context correctly.
Similarly, the user profile, when you are viewing the user's "comments", is a flat view of the comments. The option to see some thread-context here may also be nice or useful?