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All sort order is currently most to least recent. This means it is easy to get the messages just before a particular id in a channel. But this doesn't scale to long threads or channels. Ideally, when displaying a message in a channel I'll show just a bit of context before and a bit of context after it. Then wait to load any more messages until the user requests them.
But this can't be done without a sort order option. I can get some context before the id, but I must fetch all messages after the id in order to get the context after a message was posted.
All sort order is currently most to least recent. This means it is easy to get the messages just before a particular id in a channel. But this doesn't scale to long threads or channels. Ideally, when displaying a message in a channel I'll show just a bit of context before and a bit of context after it. Then wait to load any more messages until the user requests them.
But this can't be done without a sort order option. I can get some context before the id, but I must fetch all messages after the id in order to get the context after a message was posted.