Nov 9, 2023 / 🎤 Thread View (experimental), Grid View improvements

[B_Sp]

@mdubakov

Thread View is a View that shows Comments from a single Entity. This is as close to Chat as we can get . For example, it can show comments from specific Feature, or Account, or Channel. Just remember that every message in Thread View is a Comment, and you may invent some specific use cases.

So it took a while but my team has turned on Thread View to solve a growing issue we are having, and I have high hopes!

The Problem: We are working on a massive initiative and have started to run into more complex structures and ways we communicate around them within this period of time that this initiative has come front-and-center. There are a lot of abstractions - things that aren’t easily turned into typical db items like “tasks” or “resources,” but things that are concepts, overlapping areas of the business, etc. We handle this stuff pretty well in Fibery with an array of creative db’s, such as “occurrences” which mark big moments when we might change direction. The benefit of Fibery is you can use these db’s anyway you want, where in other tools you can’t get this abstract with your “work items” which are typically rigid.

This leads to the question of our free-flowing discussions in the business, which will take place in Slack, text, Email. As the complexity of what we are working on right now grows, we are seeing that much of what we discuss in real-time in these typical tools is hard to replicate by updating work in Fibery with entity creation, and comment and referencing those.

So it appears that Threads may be a great solution to try to emulate the free-flow of chat or email, but get at our fingertips the ability to reference every item we are talking about, many of which are tracked in Fibery. As a point of product development and feedback, we experimented around with Tana and the way it lets you create a Supertag that you don’t have to define during its creation - that is helpful to limit friction when chatting or texting “naturally.” Tana however is way too limited to actually manage our work, and most of what we’d make a Supertag we handle in Fibery. I have high hopes that threads will solve a great deal of our current need!

I would like to make one more plug for a few ideas that I think could really help workflow that are very closely related to Threads, since one of the benefits of Threads is you can look in the reference area of an entity and see what was discussed about it. If this could be put into chronological order with straight comments on the entity, you’d get a great history at-a-glance, w/out having to scan all the way down an entity’s page. This request is Merge Comments and References in one common Stream for better flow.

I think Threads also point out how useful it could be if comment lived as real nodes that could be referenced, quoted, etc as well, given that with the use of Threads they take on more independence. Here are some requests around this functionality:

Refer to Comments, and Public ID’s for Comments

And it would be great if you could easily refer to a comment around Fibery, especially now with Threads we will be doing even more commenting in Fibery! One way to do this is the way Discourse handles it in this forum. Right now in order to quote a comment, the only workaround we have is to either make a screenshot of the comment, then reference the entity as well, so the recipient can find the original comment easily, or try to use the “quote” formatting, but that will break the context of the full comment in which the quote is included because you can’t easily use the “soft” return (“shift” + “return”) when using those quotes because what you write above the quotes won’t come through in the reference unless it’s part of the quote itself, and thus in the reference the user can’t see the whole comment. (this might be solved with the evolution of Show in Reference Highlights Referenced Entity more clearly)

Ability to quote text across Fibery like in Discourse

I keep coming back, at least one time daily, while working in Fibery, to the need to quote text, most often in comments, to use in another part of Fibery. This is most frequently having to do with communicating with my team in Fibery, or creating new content that stems from existing stuff. We have been talking in here in many cases about how nice it would be to simple have the ability to quote like in Discourse, here’s an example of @Oshyan talking about it: Since we don’t expressly have a r…

Thanks for listening!