blog.bouah.net/content/posts/im-threads.md

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

I have had the opportunity to use Mattermost 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.