Show ancestor message on main feeds/lists to which reply is for

[ronilaukkarinen]

Pitch

Perhaps the most frustrating thing currently on Mastodon is that you see replies on the main feed, but you have no idea what they are about since you don't know the first post it's related before you click yourself into the conversation. What I'd like to see is to be able to see the first post related to that conversation.

In my mind it would work like this (this is a devtools mockup, well I also tried to make one with Vanilla JS + api v1 and kinda succeeded with it but it's far from production ready):

You would see the reply and the post indicating to it. Even better would be to see some "Show converssation" link with dashed lines between them if there were more between them.

Halcyon already does this and I love it for this but it's otherwise lacking. It fetches the data-id from HTML and then uses /api/v1/statuses to fetch the first post and then backfills the first post to HTML. This would be rather straightforward to do but I don't know the JS life of Mastodon so can't send a PR, not just yet until someone points me to a right direction.

Here's a screenshot from Halcyon Mastodon client (unmaintained):

I'd love to see this on Mastodon!

Motivation

Single replies are currently lacking on main feeds. This could be improved by a lot.

[mitexleo]

+1 to this.

[ronilaukkarinen]

Mona for iPhone also has this:

[pgl]

+1

[ronilaukkarinen]

Any thoughts on this? Shouldn't be impossible to achieve and would improve the web UI tremendously. AFAIK Phanpy has this, does @cheeaun have ideas of how to bring this to the Mastodon core?