TIL that the truly excellent Mastodon web frontend phanpy.social has a stand-alone thread view mode, meaning you can use it’s very readable thread viewer without being logged in, and friends, I am over the moon!
How to use it, manually
First, find a Mastodon post belonging to a thread/ discussion. Let’s use this real life pro tip as an example: Ben Sandofsky: "Because these billboards are just monitors rotate…" - Mastodon
Then tell fabulous phanpy to make it readable. The URL consists of the following parts: https://phanpy.social/#/, the original URL, the suffix ?view=full:
Like so: https://phanpy.social/#/https://mastodon.social/@sandofsky/111369408751604067?view=full
Really good stuff.
Shortcut Download
Of course I had to make it a simple Shortcuts workflow — pass in a URL from the macOS/iOS Share Sheet, and it’ll open the thread view in a new browser window. (It’s really super-simple.)
Phanpy Thread View.shortcut (21.6 KB)
Demo
Quick demo video, opening a thread from Ivory on macOS:
Addendum from Phanpy’s developer Chee Aun:
Do note that viewing a post thread while signed out or signed-in to instance that’s different from the post’s instance will have another issue: Phanpy doesn't load all posts by the owner of a thread · Issue #107 · cheeaun/phanpy · GitHub