I think Discourse has the idea of allowing conversations to thread themselves into new topics, I think it just doesn’t make it that easy for people to 1) create such linked topics or 2) see much detail about the linked topics.
I’ve probably said it before, but I see Discourse as like having one large conversation around the table where everyone is involved, where it goes one person by one person in a linear conversation.
Now, in real life, the large tables often fraction into smaller conversations, which I think people would call threads. Maybe the Discourse analogy is that the main table wants to stay on one topic, and so a few people jointly decide to leave the table and to go another table or another room (often a linked topic).
In real life, one can sometimes have visibility into why those people are leaving and what they want to talk about, how many people are there, what the energy of the new discussion is like, etc.
On Discourse, right now, I think the only visibility we have into the new discussion, while remaining at the current discussion, is a list of link icons with the title of the new topics:
What if that could be more detailed? Show the new topic category, tags, number of people replying to the topic, etc? Maybe also even if the topic started by someone clicking the “reply as linked topic” button within the topic vs. someone in an already existing topic posting a link to the current topic?
Right now, I have to remind myself to look at the linked topic links and honestly, each time I click them, I don’t know what I’ll get on the other side of the click besides the topic with that title.
So I wonder if it’s not about rebuilding Discourse to allow nested conversations, but rather to just highlight the linked topic feature and tweak it a little from the ease to create them and also the ease to see what exists within them.