Fun fact: the design for Element’s current threading is from a former Twist designer; make of that what you will :)

Does Zulip support nested threads?

I think what all of these platforms are discovering is that we figured out some pretty intuitive patterns early on and are on a constant loop of wanting to do something different before eventually realizing this and reverting.

There's a hybrid wherein you keep references to a branch in a thread but you still display a flat discussion. If you choose to follow the branch you can but otherwise all discussion sits on one level. I like this way more than default nesting, which can be impossible to follow.

This is kind of what you get from Slack's threads — if everyone always uses the "also share to channel" option in the thread, and if everyone also make sure to otherwise never post directly to the channel. Which is impossible to enforce, of course.

I feel like, without such a braided view, it'd be very hard to follow several threads at once, if you were e.g. helping multiple people in a "support" channel, with each conversation being a thread. Once you navigated into a thread, you wouldn't be able to see activity in sibling threads until you navigated out. You'd know that something happened, but you wouldn't be able to glance at the content to tell if it's more urgent than your current conversation. (You could rely on app toast notifications, but you might miss these if you glance away for a moment.)

I guess this is why Google Chat is now pushing thread-less rooms, and is rolling out on-the-fly threads like Slack.