The big problem is it’s really hard to have a conversation you can reply to someone and they can reply to you but the UI does not lend itself well to having a multi-person conversation, so at the moment you try and involve more than two people it just becomes a mess.

Plus I cannot stand with the fact that when somebody quotes a comment their response is placed above the original quote. Meaning I always read them out of order and don’t understand it until I remember that I need to read it bottom the top and now it makes sense.

Yeah. I also think it’s quite a bad platform for sharing ideas and discussing them, when compared to the reddit/lemmy model. As you mention, there’s no real threading of usefulness, and the posts have to be too short to really share a complex idea. And even if you do share ideas, it is unlikely to reach people who are interested in these ideas, unless you stick to a single topic for your posts. And that means you also can’t find ideas that interest you as easily. Generally you get a hodgepodge of stuff, some of which is interesting, but much of which isn’t.

These platforms have always seemed to be a vanity thing of who can garner the most likes and make viral quips but that actually most people are constantly posting and doing very little interacting with the content of others. It’s a social network for narcissists rather than those interested in ideas IMO.

It struck me that the only way to have “real” idea exchange was to use the Bluesky / Twitter posts as pointers to other content - which pretty seriously hampers the whole back-and-forth aspect of a discussion.

Well said. It’s almost as bad as YouTube. At least twitter sort of has nesting (wherein yt doesn’t), but it’s still just about impossible to comprehend when 3 or more people are conversing.