@darius never thought of it this way! So you're saying "@-example hello" should be considered a "thread" even if it's the first post (and threads should be given some kind of special treatment such as not showing on the timeline unless someone is directly involved)?

I think the "leading @" detection may be simpler than you say: Mastodon always knows when something is an @-mention so wouldn't we just have to check if the first @-mention is also the first word or there's some text before?

@ted