The edit function, by virtue of notifying of edits anyone who boosted/faved a given edited toot, seems a pretty good tool to keep people updated about a thing.
They can *kinda sorta* do what I wanted to be able do for a long time: subscribe to specific threads.
For example, if you boost/like my luftballons shitpost:
https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/109853987655515497
…and I update it when the next 🎈 goes 💥 , you will get a notification.
You will have effectively "followed" that toot. Kinda. Sorta. 🤔
@rysiek Sadly, that subscribes you to a toot as opposed to a thread.
Re subscribing to a thread: There's no reason why a fedi instance couldn't create an Actor for every thread, support following that Actor, and cc that thread's first toot to that Actor's followers. That would require others to preserve cc and would require others to surface the "follow this thread" interface.
This would also create a concept of a thread, which currently isn't really a thing. I'm not sure whether it's good or bad, but certainly the current intermediate state (no one can really moderate a thread, except that the instance of a toot's author can clandestinely suppress replies to that toot with reasonable effectiveness) is worse than either "threads exist and each one has an owner/moderator" or "there are just replies and if you federate with reply author's instance you'll see it as a reply".
The trick is finding that thread again later.
Assume you find some new info that is relevant to a thread that is 2 days old, and you want to add a comment to that thread.
Finding that thread is not simple, even if you recall who originally started it.
One option is to bookmark it, but searching thru the bookmarks can also be difficult.
And, why would you bookmark it, not knowing you may find something relevant days later?
@SpaceLifeForm @robryk @rysiek That is indeed an issue.
I think being able to add metadata in the user-agent to facilitate searching, like a title/subject to describe the thread & perhaps some tags would help.
But really, even without adding metadata, just better searching features in the various user-agents & #UI around would do a world of good for that.
@robryk @rysiek #MailingLists & #Usenet suggest to me that just considering replies to a root or its children, recursively, as a thread would be just fine.