How am I supposed to find conversations I might want to join?

Scrolling down forever in the hope that something turns up doesn't seem very efficient.

You're not alone. Without a search feature there isn't a way to find topics without scrolling down forever. I believe they are counting on people with large followings on Twitter advertising their branch and luring followers back to participate. That will probably work for spreading the word, but doesn't replace a good search.

I really dislike the Twitter requirement, and wish there were some way to avoid it. (It also leads to occasional silliness: "Why don't you invite your friend Evernote to join a branch with you?")

Hi guys, looks like you're new. So welcome!

Branch has a small team of developers as you can see on the 'our company' page, and these developers are working hard to make Branch better and I'm pretty sure they will add a search feature in the near future (the actually tweeted something like this).

You can invite people to Branches and I'm pretty sure that they can register with their e-mail address then. Just try to add someones e-mail address in the field with the 'add' button. It can however be the case that you have to link a gmail account to Branch for this, I'm not sure about this. So I'll ask it.

You don't need a Gmail account for adding people with only an e-mail address. :) twitter.com

I'm not very keen on the ask-to-join thing. It turns 'read now, comment now' into 'read now, ask to join, wait a few hours, try to remember what you wanted to say'.

I agree with the forget what you wanted to say thing. You should at least be able to see your 'ask-to-join-text'. Could be better.

Well, something needs to improve. I've encountered tech posts that have only a few comments from the mighty giants. One branch about iTunes11 was last commented on December 5th. I'm sure people still have things to say about it. I believe the problem lies in the posting delay. Moderating is work. I'm not let into every branch likely because the original poster hasn't gotten around to letting me in. I don't take it personally. The original poster usually hasn't let other people in either! ;) So take no topic search and blend it with moderation delays, and you have branches that are dying all over the site.

Still like what I see, though. Hope they work out these short-comings.

~Dˢ