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A first-class notion of a "thread"

At the moment, there seems to be no way to make a series of connected posts without paying a big price:

* If you use comments, you can't have embeds, and updates don't show on the timeline.

* If you just post again with the same tags, the reader has to know to go to a special URL to find the previous posts in the series

* If you share the post, which I think is the intended way to do this, it's worst of all — a link to the original post gives no indication whatsoever that later updates exist, AND your timeline is spammed with many copies of the entire chain of posts, and becomes truly painful to scroll through. There's also no good way to integrate this solution with tags — when you share, the original tags are lost from the share, but if you add them back to the new post, the entire blob matches the tag, and now the tag page has the same repeated-content problem as the timeline. Also, a link to the original post does not display the later posts

I really just want twitter's threading system, where a link to any post in the thread shows you posts before and after it, and when a later post appears in a timeline it displays (snippets of) the OP and 2nd-most-recent post, and intelligently collapses the display of multiple updates in a short time frame into one item.


Some other solution could be fine too, but I really, really want some way to do an update post that both makes the OP visible AND is visible from the OP, but which doesn't display the OP twice on my profile.


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oh yes, i'd absolutely love this. on twitter i'd often to singular, really long threads about shows that i was watching, games i was playing, etc; they ended up awkward to navigate if they got too big, but at least they left all the information in one place. but as others have pointed out, the current options for doing something similar on cohost all have even bigger downsides; editing an old post doesn't bump it, sharing with a comment puts a lot of increasingly bigger copies of the thread out there (and actually, it looks like the shares don't even show up in tag searches?), putting links to the other posts everywhere takes a ton of work... etc. etc.

what i think could serve as a good example of proper "threading" is how archive of our own handles chapters. it lets you:
  • select tags that'll be applied to the work as a whole (and i also think you can choose to apply tags only to specific chapters?)
  • see all of the chapters of a fic at once, in one page
  • see each chapter by itself, with links to the previous and/or next ones
  • jump from any chapter to any other chapter via a drop-down menu listing all of them
  • go to a "full-page index", which is a separate page with links to all of the chapters
i think all of this would be nice, but what i'd specifically appreciate is the full-page index; a centralized hub for all the posts in a thread would be very helpful for the specific way i structure the things i do. i'm not sure if it should, itself, be a post, though... some people might appreciate being able to share it, but then that might introduce weirdness with being able to add an index to a thread? yeah i don't know.

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