whenever I've tried describing the property of branch to anyone in person it's been hard. I think it's a beautiful idea. I think ancestors or heads would make for much easier story-telling. I've incorporated branch into my head so it's not a big deal for me. I'm not suggested dropping support for those messages @cel, I just know how ssb-sort works, and I know it doesn't know a field called branch exists, it just scrapes all refs out (all refs which are values I think...). I've thought about the ability to display the branching nature of threads and really want to do that. Have you figured out how to do it yet? The first thing on my mind is to build a graph of the thread based on branches.

Perhaps the confusing could be mitigated if we adopt the story of the tangle and then a branch as in a part ... mmm no. The problem with branch (that I have) is it sounds like a verb. As in you're declaring you're branching off, whereas you're declaring which branches were before you. echhh. It's just clumsy for me to talk about.

Where's your implementation of branch + root for votes? Did you use my work or make a variant? It would be cool to consolidate this sort of logic in one place I reckon. Maybe a generalised module for these tangle / thread type things. Re: visualising it, the only influence I really want is to make the causal sorting more consistent. Likes happen at a similar frequency to posts perhaps, so I imagine it will actually linearise a lot of previoously branching graphs....