There are a few ways of dealing with this that I've seen. On IRC, when a direct back-and-forth starts, etiquette is to name the other party specifically at the

There are a few ways of dealing with this that I've seen. On IRC, when a direct back-and-forth starts, etiquette is to name the other party specifically at the start of each line. Every client I've used will highlight those lines where your name is mentioned, making it easier to pick out your thread of conversation. The text is typically packed in pretty tight as well, which makes this more feasible in busy channels since you're not likely to have to scroll. Some clients also have a separate UI section for messages that target you, making it even easier to follow. In Slack, the chat contents are shown in a less dense way (more whitespace & separation, big user icons,) but they found a solution that seems to work pretty well, which is the 'thread' feature. (This is pretty recent AFAIK.) Threads stay collapsed for people who aren't participating and pop out for people who want to. While they are pretty much inevitable, multiple orthogonal conversations happening in a channel might also sometimes be a call for reorganization or sidebar channels/group chats. As an aside, one of my favorite experiences relating to chat is having multiple concurrent conversations with the same person or people, on different topics, in their respective channels. It highlights how bizarre the rapid context-switching pattern you fall into with chat applications is.