Only nest up to one or two rich replies

[turt2live]

Description

Anything else is just diminishing returns for conversation context and usability. See also: #5968 #5969

Version information

• Platform: web (in-browser)
• Browser: Chrome 63
• OS: Windows 10
• URL: riot.im/develop

[t3chguy]

This was the intent, a max nesting of 3 iirc but weirdly harder than it should have been to implement, just failed to work :L

[turt2live]

another related issue: #5974

[lampholder]

Considering this and the related issues - is it necessary for replies to nest at all?

Nesting has been naturally inherited from quoting, but a (series of) reply messages could be rendered in sequence:

toml
Hey, bob, how's it going

bob
Pretty good thanks, and you?

toml
Same old, same old, did you see the sports?

The event would probably contain the event id of the message being replied to + the reply text, and leave it up to the client to navigate backwards through the linked list of messages as much as it wants to (probably with an interactive bit to pull in older messages just like the 'Quote' button today.

This could potentially simplify the plaintext version problem (#5974) - the plaintext version would just be the replied-to message and the reply, ignoring the rest of the chain:

2017-09-15T12:04:33Z <toml> (@tom:lant.uk): Hey, bob, how's it going? [https://matrix.to/#/!lbPPsPcefsfdsefPjRn:lant.uk/$1513243242101Udovh:lant.uk]
Pretty good thanks, and you?

This obviously feels like it's starting to edge into thread territory, but I actually quite like that - one of the problem with threads is that they often start-before-they-start (i.e. you don't know you want a thread until you've already got someway into the conversation) - if you've already got a sequence of replies, it's not too wild a leap to imagine a 'start a thread from this sequence of replies' UX option that links the message sequence context into a thread/new room/whatever.

[turt2live]

The idea of having a thread be at most 1 level deep has always appealed to me. It's very MS Teams, which I think has a very nice threading interface. Agreed that replies would be leaning into this territory, but equally they would probably be replaced by threads later on, so having thread-like behaviour doesn't sound too outlandish to me.