I'm not sure that more fragmentation would be good. Chats are linear because conversations are linear in time. Our brains have evolved to stay on top of linear

I'm not sure that more fragmentation would be good. Chats are linear because conversations are linear in time. Our brains have evolved to stay on top of linear group conversations. Introducing too much of an opinionated interface would discourage tangents and off-topic banter, which I think is essential for a healthy group. A different idea: delayed sending. If you want to have a conversation, but it doesn't need to be now, you can schedule your message to send in, say, 20 minutes, or whenever there is a pause. If you want to implement a functional prototype, I would recommend hacking on top of one of the open source matrix clients [1], the open spec has experimental support for nested chat rooms ("spaces") [2] and threads [3]. [1] https://matrix.org/clients/ https://matrix.org/clients/ [2] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/kegan/spaces-summary/proposals/2946-spaces-summary.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/kegan/spaces-s... [3] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/kegan/msc/threading/proposals/2836-threading.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/kegan/msc/thre...