kbin feature needed: a way for users to mirror a thread from another node without integrating comments

It would be useful to be able to make a local copy of a “thread” from another node without participating in that other other thread. Think of it as a git branch.

Rationale:

1. Resilience to bugs & failures. When the other node is up and down with sketchy reliability, that seems to impact external users from participating in a thread. e.g. I get “error 500” in some cases when trying to read lemmyWorld threads. A reliable node should not impose a bad UX in situations where there is a dependency on an unreliable node.

2. I am prejudiced against some threadiverse nodes, as I’m sure many people are. E.g. I want no participation with lemmy.ml because I do not want to support their oppressive management style. That means I’m only interested in some minimal consumption of content from lemmy.ml, not production of content. So if an interesting thread emerges on lemmy.ml, there’s some benefit to being able to create a local branch where local replies are not copied back to the parent.

This feature could perhaps be called mirroring, ophaning, or branching.

It would be useful if on a case-by-case basis the user who starts a new branch can specify whether or not parent comments are also copied locally and somehow indicated as read-only.