I can only confirm that the current thread-related UX is a disaster.
Despite their disputable usefulness – there might be some – forking a conversation to a thread that is not directly visible nor highlighted and directly accessible when an answer is notified triggers confusion and waste time looking for the active thread.
I find it frustrating when a tool makes you loose time and focus, to a point I won’t accept to use it unless the following fixes are made :
- Default to in-conversation quote with the button “reply”
- Add a personal preference to (dis)allow a button “Fork to a thread” to appear on a post, with behaviour similar to the currently mislabelled “reply” with an added link in the original conversation mentioning the fork, and optionally the list of users participating in this aparte.
Then when a notification is sent for a reply in the aparte, it should be highlighted in the sidebar.
Only then it would become a useable feature and not a cumbersome counter-intuitive and counter-productive argument against Mattermost.