hi @cft, i finally got around to reading the tangle paper in depth.

My recommendation is to separate the reply information from the tangle-forming aspect: instead of branch there should be the ancestors field which strictly points to some recent tip nodes, and a separate discussion-specific reply field that points to one or more tangle entries which can be quite old at the time of posting.

while not documented well, as far as i understand branch is the same as your ancestors, as in it's only used for tangle-forming. @mix added a fork field (i think for TickTack?) to signal discussion flows, which is similar to your reply field: %+fBXl12.... confusingly, @matt added a reply field for Patchwork which does something different: %5mjm4vF....

For example, about records are used for implementing event-participation where peers declare that they will be attendees: However, based on the available information in the logs, it is not possible to deduce strong happened-before relations among about events i.e. who committed first

yes, while it's probably hidden, there's rough consensus that we should use root and branch (as described in your tangle paper as root and ancestors) for just about every message type: about, vote (like: %zrIKdNx...), etc.

generally, am stoked that you took the time to document this! keen to find a way to incorporate this into the overall Scuttlebutt documentation, as we've independently come to the same conclusions.