Hi Philipp, thanks for your feedback. Le samedi 26 avril 2025, 12:26:47 heure d’été d’Europe centrale Philipp Hörist a écrit :
The one thing that bugs me about the reply method is, that it depends on that i go searching first if someone else has replied to be able to send a message.
This leads to the situation that multiple threads are created if different people answer nearly at the same time. At this point its unclear how to go forward. Certainly the two people didn't want to have separate threads.
I don't see that it's needed to check for other replies. If two people start a reply at the same time, there will be two threads with the same parent, in the UI this appears like a tree, i stays readable. This is what happens on sites like Reddit on ActivityPub (but on Mastodon, the tree doesn't appear in comments, making it very confusing IMO).
Further stuff like moderate can remove all content from a message, it would destroy the link to the parent message if the first reply gets moderated. Leaving all other messages hanging in the air without context.
Indeed, that's a problem if the first reply with the new thread ID is deleted, good point.
So for me the thread string needs to be generated out of the parent message to avoid this, and also make it simple.
If for some reason the community deems it absolute necessary to create threads from messages that don't have a thread themself s, i would simply take the message-id of the parent message and use it as a thread id, circumventing any mentioned problems above. This is even moderate safe, because the message- id is never moderated.
Yeah, that's the alternative that I have proposed. I think that using parent message ID as thread ID is a good option, maybe with a XEP to explain this behaviour. This can be used at the same time as XEP-0461, so clients implementing only XEP-0461 can still see it as a reply (but XEP-0461 says that it should not be used for sub-thread, so if other replies are made using XEP-0461, it may be a problem).
This comes at the cost of losing the feature to signal that a message should not be used for a thread.
How do you signal that a message should not be used for a thread, and why would you do that? From a UX point of view, I think that it would be bad that some messages can be replied in a thread, and some other can't, the end-user would not understand why sometime the button appears, and sometimes not. Best, Goffi