You mean like a messenger app does it? Would make sense, but let me test, how it looks :)

Hmm, I like your idea Jon, but it seems that the talk page structure is very very complicated to style :/ Example:

@Nirzar How do we want to solve this?

Stop indenting after a certain depth?

Reset indentation after a certain indentation?

What is the ideal design for this case?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Outdent , which is already used to solve this problem on desktop.

One option would be to duplicate that with CSS, editing length and depth as necessary:

div > dl > dd > dl > dd > dl > dd > dl > dd > dl > dd > dl > dd > dl > dd {
    margin-left: -6.4em;
}
div > dl > dd > dl > dd > dl > dd > dl > dd > dl > dd > dl > dd > dl > dd::before {
    display: block;
    height: 12px;
    width: 8.4em;
    background: url( /* some equivalent image */ );;
    content: '';
}

@Yair_rand a max indent, after which everything starts there, seems the simplest idea; outdenting seems a lovely if more complex one. Either would be a great improvement.

@Jhernandez an oldie but goodie :)

I can't tell why this is stalled from looking at the umbrella ticket. What's the current status?

The mobile app seems to cap talk page indents at level 1 -- which is almost no threading at all (the "reply-to" icon doesn't link to the section it is replying to), but never unreadable.
Desktop on mobile seems to use a single em for each indent, which works a bit better, but still breaks down at high indents.

A combination of the two that caps at sth like level 6 would work for most cases.

@Sj T116686#6950334
The plan is to replace the entire feature with the https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk_pages_project

@Jdlrobson : still the plan?

Yep. Not sure what the latest on this is. @matmarex @ppelberg - is this on your radar?

This is very much not a demonstration of something that works better for deep discussions on mobile, but it might be a useful visualization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:DiscussionToolsDebug?pagetitle=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump_%28technical%29

That shows the data that's available to something using the DiscussionTools APIs (as the mobile-apps do now), rearranged into something akin to a reddit-like thread display. Given that it mostly works well, we actually have a lot of flexibility going forwards to reformat talk pages in highly constrained environments...

(@ppelberg is on a break)

In T116686#7462374, @Jdlrobson wrote:

The plan is to replace the entire feature with the https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk_pages_project

In T116686#8751874, @Sj wrote:

@Jdlrobson : still the plan?

That plan has in fact been completed: T298060: [RELEASE TICKET] Offer Mobile DiscussionTools at All Wikis

It didn't include a fix for the indentation problems though. We've brainstormed some ideas about indentation on T331624 (looks like we forgot about this task – I'll merge them), but as far as I know we're not planning to implement any of them right now.

Thank you both!

I like a combination of 2 / 3 / 5:

Use reduced indentation with a line to emphasize which comments are at the same level, as done in the iOS app; cap indents at some depth (5-6); collapsible threads.

The collapsing makes the greatest improvement to reading experience.

@DLynch that's a very cool viz indeed, thank you for sharing. That can be quite useful on desktop too (see also: how well used the collapse templates are!)
I hope we can get some indentation solution on the roadmap.