For my purposes, just having the option to hide them entirely would be ideal.
I can see a potential use case for going above and beyond and replicating the Mastodon UI treatment as you described, but I don’t personally think it’s necessary here.
Hmm, I just installed the new version and setting excludeConversationStarters=”true” kills my whole feed, instead of just the one entry that starts with an @ to another user. (Site is https://og.treadingground.com – feed is on the right)