I just recently noticed the following button in the comment section:
Clicking it appears to make the comments look somewhat like what you see on Mastodon, but I'm a little unsure about it's exact format. Is it only showing parent comments? Is it showing parent and child comments all mixed together? If so, in what order? Is it in order of when the comment was added? If it does show child comments, is it possible to see that child's context?
You wont be able to see any reply context?
EDIT: Upon testing here, it appears not. That makes it rather unuseable, does it not?
I believe the idea is that it's a way of ensuring that you see all of the new content. As it is, sorting just by new alone doesn't always work, because a new reply to an old comment doesn't filter to the top that way.
It lets you see new comments. Then you find an interesting one and click "Show context"* to see it within the threaded comment chain.
* may not work in lemmy 0.18.3
It appears that I do have the "Show context" button (granted it's a little hard to notice at first), but it appears to not be functioning properly. I just tested it in this thread by clicking "Show context" for this comment, and instead of showing me this comment, as I would expect, it instead showed me this comment.
Welcome to Lemmy!
Lemmy is new, and serious larger scale use has only started in the last couple of months. There are many bugs, and every new release solves some bugs and interoduces some new ones.
The comment issue was a gift from the latest version of Lemmy. I've been hoping for a fix soon but there doesn't seem to be any progress on it. I'm considering rolling back the frontend website to the previous version because it's so annoying, but I need time to test this to make sure it will work before doing it.