@[email protected] said in Traversing the reply chain when working with topics:
more replies from Mastodon might be missed than is ideal
You are not incorrect. In practice the following situation happens occasionally, especially in larger/busy topics:
- You post a reply to a topic/thread (branch A), but a different branch (B) of the topic occurs outside of your view (since the activities are not forwarded to you)
- Later on, someone you do follow replies in branch B, and you receive it.
- Traversal finds 20 posts in between you missed, and they are all added at once, and you receive the notification of new posts in the topic, except now all of the "new" posts are scattered throughout the linear flow
- Additionally, some of these new posts might appear in places higher up than where you last read
So this violates the assumption (at least in NodeBB) that if you have a "read up to" point in a topic, that there will not be new content above that point.
@[email protected] said in Traversing the reply chain when working with topics:
is it still right to say that those replies are part of your topic in a coherent sense?
From a purely technical point of view, yes, they are part of the same context (at least as derived via reply chain traversal), but from a UX POV, you could make that argument.
A forum with a linear flow of posts tends to diverge less often due to the nature of the presentation of posts themselves; something threaded models don't need to contend with.