Lemmy

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

submitted 2 years 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 2 years 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 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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 0 points 2 years 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 2 years ago

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.