Formatting and usage of threads in the OAE group

Back in 2018, in a comment in this Housekeeping thread, I said:

> what I'm proposing is that we try to identify some generic families of open app ecosystem, so folks can focus in on the discussions that are most relevant to the work they're doing, or the projects they want to get started.

The idea being that each of these "families" could have a subgroup here ...

> ... where we can drill down into the nuts and bolts of our implementations, our tech choices, and our successes and failure, and help each other avoid dead ends, or identify areas in which we can pool dev resources.

Here's some examples of the kinds of subgroups I had in mind:

• self-hosting: individuals hosting services for themselves

• community hosting: groups hosting sevices for all those who can't or don't want to self-hosted

• informal social networking (federated and P2P networks)

• community organizations (formal governance and working groups)

• commercial organizations (formal governance and working groups)

• software forges (combining code hosting etc with community governance tools to facilitate user-driven development)

Note that I'm not proposing subgroups for "federation protocols", for example, or "user controlled clouds". I think it's better that we focus on what users *need* from digital platforms, and match technologies to those needs. That said, I am happy to create a subgroup on any OAE topic where I can identify 3 people who would actively use it and serve as the inital admins.

As I understand its purpose, OAE is more of a cross-fertilization space between projects, I'm not keen to have OAE subgroups for individual projects. If that's needed, I think we'd be better to work with a community-hosting group to to set up Loomio instance, so free code projects can have their own full-featured Loomio group.

I know these references can be set, and I do. Even so, I don't find that the scrolling of the page works that well, when I'm looking into the history and hoping to retrieve something - or just get an overview or refresh my memory of how things have run over a long period (as prompted by @Danyl Strype 's recent comment). It's not that easy to identify different comments when there are very many of them, with many responses too. Dropping into a comment from an outside link doesn't seem to reliably highlight the specific comment. I know the right-hand slider is supposed to help somehow but it's not clear just how.

What's hot is easy enough to see. What's happened, and the shape of it, is not easy to see.

@mike_hales I think that I share the same issue. I struggle with forum threads: we need something to capitalise the outcomes of the discussions. In the old Knowledge Base System from MS, the forums where combined with a wiki like JIRA goes with Confluence. What can be used to capitalise knowledge in OAE ?

Imagine the threads are headings questions and people answers bellow, and the answer space is a wiki. Instead of scrolling threads, u chose on the question you want to answer, or to check.

It's easy to do that with shared Gdocs, here is an example. A friend did a OS prototype to reflect this methodology

I hope this helps.

This thread was a test of the forking feature. It was meant to be about ideas for OAE subgroups, but the trailing comments (which I couldn't unselect) seem to have provoked a discussion about the pros and cons of how Loomio threads work. Does anyone mind if I rename this thread to reflect that, and start a new one focused on subgroups?

I think so. The issue will not be solved in subgroups, as this can go endless. It's better to rethink the purpose of threads. The way I see, these can have self-organizing mechanism so people follow what they can contribute more. With a certain key-question you can fork the discussion within the raised topic.

@Danyl Strype - I don't mean to keep going off thread, but like @mike_hales and others, I too find some of the especially long threads very hard to follow.

Personally I blame this on nested replies. I remember Loomio threads being easier to read, and displaying more responsively, when threads were a simple, chronological stream of comments. Emoji reactions now avoid most "+1" or "thanks" type comments that used to bloat threads, leading to most of the demand for nested responses, and a well thought out 'forking' UX would deal with cases where a topic needs to diverge in two or more directions.

Would anyone object if I turn off nested comments for the OAE group, if this is possible?

What?! @Danyl Strype! This is what I suggested in the first place back in the other thread! Please make this flat list and newest. Can we make it the default? Then new messages are always at the top! Yay! Simple! 🎉🙂