I’m interested in this feature too.
I think it’s worth noting that sometimes users may want to branch a conversation out from a permanent channel (e.g. Development) into a topical discussion (e.g. #issue-X), and to have all of these topical discussions be grouped, archived and searchable, like the Discourse topics are, but still keep the real-time chat dynamic.
Currently, moving from chat to topic not only branches the discussion into a siloed topic (what we want) but also changes the flow of the discussion into something slower. I appreciate that sometimes we want to slow things down as the discussion “formalizes” but maybe sometimes we don’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is why some of Jakke’s users reportedly kept using the chat - it’s not that they didn’t realize there’s now a dedicated topic, it’s that they wanted to maintain the fast flow of conversation.
In our community, we have some users actually moving from the forum, where the conversation started, into Discord, so that they can hash out the debate in real-time using Discord threads.
I plan to push for consolidating comms into Discourse once we upgrade to 3.0, and I’m excited for “fancy mode”, but I’m also concerned that there will continue to be cases where we need to branch discussions from the real-time channels and our only option will be the slower topic structure, which may drive users back to Discord threads.
I think there is a gap here in which Discourse’s own take on threads could shine.
A few ideas:
- Threads should be defined as a branched topical real-time chat that can be formed dynamically by anyone and later archived (perhaps with a conclusion stated by the creator of the thread).
- Threads should be viewable in their own list, like topics are, and we should be able to filter, group, sort, etc, by the associated channel/category/topic that the thread branches from. One of the biggest weaknesses of competing implementations in tools like Discord/Slack is thread discoverability - Discourse has the building blocks to do it much better.
- It would be cool to be able to thread off from literally any message, not only threading from real-time chats but also from slower topic replies. For example, if someone replies to a topic and you have a small clarifying question about their reply but one that you don’t want to distract the main topic with, you could start a real-time thread quoting the relevant part of their reply. Replies could even have multiple threads and these could all be visible to anyone viewing the topic. This would eliminate the problem my community has of people wanting to branch away from Discourse to hash things out more quickly. It would also have the byproduct of keeping topics cleaner - since they should be narrowed down to well-formulated arguments while all the rough stuff branches off into threads.
- If you’re worried about the branching discussions making it harder to follow the big picture, I think this can be addressed by 1) people crystallizing the branched discussions into more formulated topic replies, 2) AI summarization tools.
Edit to add:
I think we are approaching a point, especially if threads are being experimented with by the core team, where the hierarchy of topics/replies/chats/threads will need clarifying in the UI/UX.
Currently it’s already somewhat confusing. I can reply to a topic and I can reply to a reply. Currently the only difference between the two visually is that the reply to a reply has an indicator showing who I replied to. For others following along, it can be hard to see how the topic’s discussion branches. We may benefit from nesting the replies to replies a la Reddit. The building blocks are already there in the Post Voting plug-in.
Introduce threads and the questions about hierarchy/branching go deeper.
If we have the ability to form threads from topic replies, these would need to be visually distinct from nested replies to replies (assuming that change was made), since they’re still functionally distinct with threads being a real-time branch while replies would be a nested continuation of the slower topic structure.