That was impressively quick.

Looking forward to Github/Gitlab repository rooms and activity integration.

In the acquisition announcement they also mentioned threading though, which is the most important feature Element is missing for me.

Without it I'm very hesitant to use it in a professional setting.

I do hope that threads will look much more like Zulip rather than Slack (which is a mess), or offer different view modes. Zulips nested channel concept is a game changer.

(as I understand it, the protocol already has the required plumbing)

Matrix now has two flavours of threading defined and implemented as we experiment with the different approaches: label-based threading in MSC2326[1] (i.e. "filter this room to only show msgs tagged #foo"), and full-blown free-form HN/Reddit/NNTP/SMTP/Twitter style threading in MSC2836[2]. The former is closer to Zulip, and is implemented in Synapse. The latter is closer to HN, and is implemented in Dendrite[3][4].

Clientwise, Element supports neither so far, but we're experimenting with the HN-style threading in a dedicated playground called Cerulean[5]. The idea is to get it working well there, and then figure out how to merge it most effectively into Element. So: it's not ready yet, but it's getting tantalisingly close. We'll probably start hosting a demo version of Cerulean next week so folks can play along and see how it feels :)

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc232...

[2] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/kegan/msc/thre...

[3] https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/pull/1589

[4] https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/pull/1596

[5] https://github.com/matrix-org/cerulean

So...could I write a gateway that provides functionality for threads to be pulled in from HN/Reddit/NNTP/SMTP/Twitter (MSC2836)? Think Epiverse [1] within Matrix and its clients.

[1] https://epiverse.co/

There's https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge, supports Reddit/Matrix and many more plus API for extensions.