Zooming in to reveal things will only make it more ambiguous since the right depth at which we hide away content will vary based on the content.
We can more intuitively build this with nestable using deep links. Each layer/level can be shown in one canvas and a deeplink to another canvas that captures a more granular level of any of the components would be a much scalable and generic approach.
Biggest challenge to me is the UX and navigating the relationships between entities (systems, components/modules, classes, functions, read/write memory, etc) requires a lot of design effort around how they work together consistently at all levels. Conceptually, your view is a set of boxes that are a filter/group-by over a lot of entities at some level, and you want to explode only some of those entities. eg. say you want to zoom into a micro-service's component level, but still see external APIs, which could be a single box per API or boxes for each endpoint. So the control you need over the way zooming works and the 'lens' over relationships filter/group-bys can easily become very complex; probably a good research project itself though!
I do think it's possible to build a good interface that would allow viewing from global cloud scale systems and right into the code through multiple paths, like design patterns/components or git repos with files/folders, but I'm not sure how nice it's going to be to use. There's a reason UML modelling didn't stick around. And I'm not sure there's enough of a business case to fund it, but I'll definitely keep hoping to see it some day.
Maybe on a smaller scale, it would be manageable though. I remember seeing some presentations that use Prezi and that has the ability to nest text at different zoom levels, and the transitions between slides worked pretty well and you did still have a sense of place, but the presenters didn't have tons of content all over like in the youtube link. I wish I had a link handy for the Prezi presentation I saw online because some of them were structured like your description about different zoom levels, like a fractal.
I used to make entire presentations, systems diagrams, story boards, etc all using scale as a meaningful piece of information. You could go way overboard with it but it was really great. (We used to have a saying "Your Prezi is making me dizzy" for folks that overdid the flying nature)
Some initial notes:
- On the very first initial load, ~~there's no default tool selected~~ it selects the 'hand' tool in the bottom left, which hides the cursor. It seems to select the pointer tool after a refresh. I'm able to replicate in an incognito browser or by clearing site data. After scanning your documents, it appears its touchscreen related. My guess is that it got confused because I'm using one of the ASUS Duo laptops.
- I personally think it makes more sense to start docs on "What is Context" (on the documentation drawer), but that's a matter of opinion. The sandwich icon isn't as obvious as I'd like though, and it'd be nice to have a link to the next page at the bottom of every article.
- my initial thought from the sequence diagrams panel was that I could type to generate an initial image, then drag that into my canvas for position changes.
- this actually makes me think about mermaid's rendering engine, and how hard it would be to support moving and "pinning" an element, such that further diagram changes need to work around the pinned elements.
This is a product I REALLY want. Since I want to be able to diagram entire complex systems without always seeing 10,000 boxes on screen. You could start a presentation at 35,000 feet, showing the entire rough structure, then zoom into different regions where more detail will appear (infinitely)
Nestable feels more like excalidraw, with a folder/file structure?