Announcement Channel - Blog Post Format (Mock-ups included) (Feature Request)

Servers which manage a significant community, especially those focused on following official sources (game development, game updates, musicians, and so on) - Would really benefit from a more expansive and official way to format announcement posts.

The current implementation of the announcement channel is great, but due to the limitation on image positioning (only after a message), and the relatively limited formatting in terms of text size, etc. It is difficult to create compelling official blog-style posts within this channel.

My proposal is that a new form of "Blog Format" post is introduced, which contains some of the features of embeds, but with a focus on expandable long-form messages. These messages would be condensed down into a title and thumbnail, which can then be clicked to expand into a long-form article, with images able to be embedded in-line, a few variations of font sizes (Normal, Large, Title) and the ability to set a few additional settings, such as whether this article creates a reply thread automatically, which embedded images is used as the post thumbnail, and the author / author url of the post.

You can see a similar idea to this in the rival messaging platform, Slack. They have a rich text post editor which allows for much longer messages with inline image support.



Here is a mock-up of how a blog post format would look in a text channel:
https://i.imgur.com/FltT9iz.png
(Can't seem to upload these images directly, sorry)

And how it would look when reading it in the expanded view with the side-panel text chat.
https://i.imgur.com/zAslN5r.png
(Can't seem to upload these images directly, sorry)

ADDITIONAL NOTES / FEATURES
Allow image alt-text / captions.
Useful for both those with impaired sight, but also for additional context for the included images.

Option to allow users to leave reactions on in-line post images
Allowing each image to be a point of interaction means you could gauge interest in certain screenshots, community artwork, etc. and use this information in a follow up post, or simply to allow users to show their appreciation of individual in-line images.

Upload a thumbnail separately, rather than choosing the first embedded image
This would allow an extra degree of artist control over the thumbnail design.

Variable thumbnail height
Allow taller images to be used as thumbnails to enable more visual space.

QUESTIONS:
Isn't this just fancy threads?
Yes! That's part of my design approach. I wanted to ensure the feature required very little in the way of changes to the understood structure. What is simply being requested here is more formatting options, and preview of a longer-form post as the initial post which the thread is attached to. Ideally, the article contents and thread comments would be separated in a meaningful way to allow the conversation to have a natural starting point and not have to scroll through the entire article to leave a comment (Or scroll all the way back to the start of the thread to see the article again).

Can't you do this by making the preview as an image anyway?
Yes, theoretically you could have this exact system using Threads. You would upload an edited image to look like the thumbnail preview, and then post the article as the first Thread reply. However, this would not update the preview text if the article was adjusted, and it would note provide any of the other features mentioned above (inline images, formatting options, viewing article and thread side-by-side, etc.)

What happens when this announcement message gets published to followers?
The functionality remains mostly the same. Except instead of the thread being accessible to followers of the announcement channel, the thumbnail becomes a link to view the full post, and the comments area provides a link to join the server where the original message appeared. This way the comments are still only added to within the bounds of the original announcement server's community guidelines/rules, but the source link provides additional discord server traffic.

Alternatively, the discussion area could be replaced by a comment thread for the following server's users to reply to instead.

CLOSING REMARKS
I think this feature has a lot of potential to better enable official discord servers (and less official) to create compelling announcements, which can still be published to channel followers in the same way, but with additional context.

Needless to say, just as it has been useful in my post here today, having the ability to include in-line images and better formatting to enable rich-text announcement posts would be incredibly beneficial.