5 hours later, and basically all of the requirements of the main-continuity message view have been implemented, including images, lists, links, alerts, reactions and placeholder buttons for opening reply threads!

it even automatically loads more messages as you scroll upwards, but i dont have any long enough channels to demonstrate that (loads 100 messages at a time since that costs the minimum per request in terms of github rate limits)

all that’s left now is taking actions (sending messages, reacting etc), and then getting realtime notifications from the backend