---
title: "IM Threads"
date: 2018-09-22T22:00:00+01:00
draft: true
---

I have had the opportunity to use [Mattermost](https://www.mattermost.org) for
over a year, and I thought I would give some feedback on a feature I still
have troubles dealing with: **threads**.

A bit of a disclaimer, Mattermost is the only solution of its kind
(centralized, non-standard, one blessed client) that I have used extensively.
I do not use Slack, Gitter, Discord or what have you. I generally use XMPP and
IRC (via XMPP), in my terminal.

I haven't gone through all the stages of grief yet concerning this topic, so
please bear with me. This article addresses usability issues with the web
client. I do not have solutions to offer, but I hope that my criticism will be
taken into account, and I would be happy to work with the project to try and
improve the feature.

## What I understand people want

- A way to group discussions by topic.
- Being able to talk without having to state context all the time.
- Being able to refer to these discussions in their integrity, (via some URI,
  or else), to even read days later.
- Not having to highlight every concerned party in every message.
- Not being highlighted if you are not part of it

Out of context this feels like people just wanted _channels_, because this is
exactly what I described, but certainly details are important here. What I
think people want is _fine grained_ all-of-the-above, that is, have usual
channels set a common topic, e.g., "programming", and be able to split
discussions happening in this channel even more, with some kind of nested
channels, or threads.

---
WIP

This last bullet point is actually the most important part.

## Implementation case study

Mattermost, as other IM solutions, regroup most of these features under what
they call __threads__.

I'll try to report a couple of things to upstream if possible, in the
meantime here's what I think about it:

- In MM: missing fork feature: after 3 messages in a thread it's already
  diverged from the original discussion, and might get back to it at some
  point later on. What changes from a normal channel?

- In MM, UI is unintuitive:
  * Not easily accessible. You have to move your pointer to the small icon at
    the far right of your screen.
  * No keybindings to navigate between threads, that makes them a hard to use.
  * Thread messages appear in the channel, that makes the whole thing
    unreadable when there are multiple threads active at the same time.
  * Bug? threads window not scrolling down automatically.
  * possible resolution: change into short-lived channels?
  * Can only have one thread opened at a time. That means if I want to follow
    a thread, I can't reply to/follow any other threads.

- Too much micro-management to get right


- Mattermost should allow users to attach anything (Direct Messages, Channels)
  where the current thread UI lives, so they don't have to start a "fake thread"
  just to be able to counter the limitations of the tool. Especially in 1:1
  Direct Messages, where most of the benefits of threads are moot.