It has the same problem every other threaded system has: notification of updates. How do you know what's changed and what hasn't? At least with linear chat you can draw a line on the screen and everything below it is new. Slashdot wasn't bad in that it greyed out everything you'd already seen and only show you the new messages, but even then you had to scroll all the way up and down the page to see what's new. If you could tag threads to follow...
WOAH. I just found the hidden side pane that organizes all conversations by date, the most recent changes at the top. You click on it and it shows you the whole thread. Then you click on 'new pane' and it opens just that thread in a new window!!
Designer/frontend dev here -- thank you! Helping users understand what is going on in the tree has been a core challenge. However, exposing too much right away is very overwhelming, especially to people who are unaccustomed similar chat interfaces. I've been learning a lot about how to get the UX for this right from user feedback, but there's much more to explore. If you are interested in chatting about this problem, feel free to ping me in &heim. :)
One amusing anecdote. We very recently rolled out two bits of functionality: auto-collapsing long threads, and defaulting to replying to your own thread you started. Many of the people who jumped in and started spamming today didn't realize they were confined to their own collapsed threads. :)
I have a hard time going back to IRC and Slack because it is so difficult when two or three conversations goes on at the same time in busy rooms. Flowdock only lets you go one conversation deep, though.
I've been a user on the site for a few months now. There's a lot you can imagine would be difficult with threaded chat, but in practice it works pretty well, to the point that I generally miss having the ability to reply to a specific message on other chat platforms.
Some of the rooms are private, but you're welcome to check out https://euphoria.io/room/heim/ (the dev chat) and https://euphoria.io/room/welcome/ (where most newcomers end up.) There's also an xkcd chat, which was very active for a while, but I'm not sure what it's like now.
This is like IRC and FB posts fused together. I love it. In traditional IRC you have many topics intertwined - very distracting / waste of time if you only care about a single topic and don't have time to sift through everything typed. Slack very much suffers from that same problem - you care about something important - and there's all that noise.
With the introduction of threaded conversations you could collapse and ignore threads you don't care about and drill into the details of the things you want/need.
I like that you can host it yourself. I'ld like to guide my company away from email+phone but it is a long way to go. And in Europe there are still a lot of concerns if you can't host something in your own environment.
I don't see any FOSS / paid modern solutions similar to slack, flowdock, scrollback, .. ready to be hosted in your environment. HipChat seems to be the only solution with a standalone server available. There are some open source competitors but they are far from production-ready. Am I missing something?
Threaded replies does seem nice to have, but not nice enough that I'd be willing to give up on the other features of IRC.
One thing that'd be nice to have with IRC is if there were a cheap host somewhere that easily let people run their own weechat instance; too many of the people I talk with keep disconnecting because they don't have / can't be bothered with having their own server with a bouncer. (There's stuff like http://blinkenshell.org/wiki/Start but I was thinking something that one can recommend to complete newbies.)
The interesting thing about IRC is that it can be modified to suit any individual's taste. But, that takes time and expertise. That guarantees IRC will stay within a niche audience of people technical enough to bend it to their will. What I'm liking about these new chat systems is it has some of the best features of IRC made available to all users with an interface they can understand and use.
