you can kind of say that, but I wouldn't try to compare the…

you can kind of say that, but I wouldn't try to compare them directly as blockchain only deals with messages and not threads or streams. the point is that Branches will show every branch, so if I'm 3 branches deep into a conversation, the people with Branches selected will see those threads in the Public stream, but the people with Roots wont unless they start exploring from the root thread (which does show up in the stream), or unless someone upvalued a message at the head of some branch