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Instead of someone mentioning the bot in a thread, why not allow people to paste the tweet url, and view it in threaded format? This can be a alternative Twitter reader.

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Thanks for the suggestion, and it's a thought I had myself. The main issue there is that unrolling doesn't happen in real time: a copy is stored in Thread Tree with all the node positions worked out, and that takes a minute or two to fetch.

It's not great UX to say "thanks for submitting a URL, come back in like ten minutes to see if we've gotten to it".

I would personally use this if I didn't have to spam the thread I just want to read with a request.

Just to update you: I've added this feature. It actually doesn't take more than a few seconds to build the thread, but there's some space for progressive enhancement with a progress bar / spinner... I'll think some more on that, in the meantime.

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