Lemmy

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Could the "Comments" view be threaded? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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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??

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[–] Fenzik@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t really see the benefit. Comments are always in the context of the post, remove that context and the comments will be hard to follow.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Fair point, though I don't think it's fatal ...

Why have a comments view in the first place
if we're going to have a comments view at all then wouldn't it be better to at least provide the context of the reply thread, and
in a sufficiently focused community, I'm sure you could quickly get the gist of what the topic of conversation is and whether you want to look at the parent post.

[–] Fenzik@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But comments are already threaded… the only change here that I can see would be to throw all the comments onto one pile instead of splitting them out by post.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They are already threaded in the “comments” view? That’s news to me … maybe I’m missing it in the view. There certainly isn’t formatting as there is when viewing posts.

[–] Fenzik@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Actually I’ve just taken a look and found the feature that you are talking about! I totally misunderstood, I thought you meant the comments under a post which is why I was confused. There already is a view of all comments on one pile, and those don’t seem to be threaded… which to me is madness. I don’t really see the added value of that view but I totally agree that, given that is exists, it should be threaded.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

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?

[–] Fenzik@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Maybe we don’t mean the same thing. Comments on Lemmy are indented and under their parent comments, just like on Reddit, and you can follow the conversation that way. That’s what I mean by threading.

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