One of the most sought-after features for customers of Slack Technologies Inc.’s team messaging app was something to simplify public conversations by bundling messages with related replies.

Slack today debuted its solution: threaded messaging, a feature well-known to email, Twitter and Facebook users that allows anyone to follow up on a conversation topic within a channel with selected people. Plainly dubbed Threads, the feature allows replies to be collected in one space instead of littering the main channel with comments only a few people may care about.

If someone posts something in the “editorial channel” about a new restaurant opening up, for instance, he or she can hover over the message and click Start a New Thread. A separate conversation on that topic will then begin in the right sidebar, and those involved will appear as thumbnail images.

Threaded messaging is essentially a de-cluttering tool, something most users of the popular enterprise messaging platform will be pleased to see. What’s perhaps quite original with this new feature is that while participants might be out of the private chat about a new restaurant, they can see who has joined and have the ability to join if they wish.

The upshot: You no longer need to scroll past conversations you couldn’t care less about.

Because it’s likely that any given channel could have a bunch of threads going at the same time, users will be updated. They won’t, however, see the regular notification of an unread message unless they are directly mentioned through their “@” username. Users will only see that the “All Threads” view in the sidebar is highlighted, telling them there’s a new message within a thread they have commented on. So users could, say, visit the restaurant several times and offer several reviews over several months, without ever confusing their editorial neighbors or, for that matter, forgetting the restaurant topic.

Some observers wondered why it took Slack two years and many iterations to come up with such a seemingly basic feature. But the company’s app, whose features are hardly unique, has set itself apart from rivals with its slick, easy-to-use interface. As Fast Company noted in an article on the process, the company took pains to make sure that in trying to simplify conversations, it didn’t make things worse.

Threads will be available for desktop and mobile apps in coming days.

Photos courtesy of Slack