Quoted posts

Julian Fietkau

@trwnh @silverpill @[email protected] I guess we don't have to do pubsub if we don't want to. But addressing conversations to a closed circle of people instead of having everything public is something that, broadly generalizing, people want, so we probably want some form of identity management and authentication and recipient addressing. My gut feeling is at that point we're in "social network" territory. But I've never been someone to dwell much on semantics and I don't feel strongly about it here.

infinite love ⴳ

@[email protected] @silverpill @[email protected] that's basically just message passing. a message doesn't have to be a "post".

infinite love ⴳ

@[email protected] @silverpill @[email protected] to clarify: a message can also be a request, or a command, or a statement, or a query. we limit ourselves greatly when we think only in terms of “posts”. even within the limits of a “post”, we still have multiple contexts within which we can consider the message.

Scott M. Stolz

@infinite love ⴳ We already have different types of messages. Notes, articles, likes, etc. ActivityPub can handle those and more. How it typically works is that platforms ignore types they don't understand, which is expected behavior.

For example, Hubzilla has events and RSVPs. Other platforms don't. So only Hubzilla displays the post as an event. Everyone else displays it as a note.

Or a project management system might manage tasks over ActivityPub, but that doesn't mean other platforms will support it.

Platforms that understand posts and followers will interoperate. Project management systems will interoperate. But you have to get creative to get both of those to work together.

infinite love ⴳ

@scott those are all posts

this isnt about activitypub

infinite love ⴳ

@scott i mean “message” in the sense that raw HTTP requests and responses are “messages”.

Scott M. Stolz

@infinite love ⴳ That can be anything you want to.

Scott M. Stolz

@infinite love ⴳ If it's a post, I'll use ActivityPub or Nomad Protocol. For everything else, I'll just use an API or something like that.

infinite love ⴳ

@scott i want an ecosystem of standardized APIs with semantics beyond just “posts”. does that help?

i want an API to talk to people and machines in equal measure

Scott M. Stolz

@infinite love ⴳ Sounds reasonable to me. I'm not sure how that's related to quoted posts (the topic of this thread), but I support the idea.

infinite love ⴳ

@scott the thread drifted a lot from “showing software icons” to “interoperability is the goal of software” to me disagreeing with that last bit

Scott M. Stolz

@julian Sorry if I was a bit salty earlier and I didn't want to rain on anyone's parade.

There are many benefits to this proposed variation of quote posts where the person being quoted can update or delete their quote.

Let me argue the other side then.

One big benefit of this proposed quote post methodology is that it would be a version that Mastodon, et. al. would probably be willing to support. They have valid concerns that people will abuse quote posts to harass others. This proposal mitigates that.

It also is useful in non-malicious contexts since people can fix typos and errors in their original post. It's also useful if the person being quoted wants to retract what they said, perhaps because they changed their mind on a topic or found new information.

Malicious use can be mitigated in the UI by indicating the quoted person changed their post and providing a history of changes. Some platforms already do this for regular posts.

The quoted person being able to delete their quote raises some unique philosophical questions, like whether a politician can delete something they said from a journalist's quote post. Or where someone intentionally changes their post in a malicious manner, which alters the quote post and makes the person quoting someone else look bad.

So, there are many facets to this proposal. It still may be good to pursue even if some platforms aren't going to implement it. But there are also some scenarios we want to consider.

Christian Stange

@[email protected] said in Quoted posts:

One big benefit of this proposed quote post methodology is that it would be a version that Mastodon, et. al. would probably be willing to support. They have valid concerns that people will abuse quote posts to harass others. This proposal mitigates that.

It also is useful in non-malicious contexts since people can fix typos and errors in their original post. It's also useful if the person being quoted wants to retract what they said, perhaps because they changed their mind on a topic or found new information.

Well, and Mastodon et. al. are free to implement it that way. There is of cause the limitation of the technical solution on the Forum side regarding editing or deleting; but Mastodon is free to implement it as links. In the same way as a Forum solution has to implement it as qoutes, because the context is different.

That means that if the forumpost actually becomes edited or deleted, Mastodon will delete it, because the link has disappeared, but if the Mastodon qoute disappears, the qoute stays in the forum, but the link back to source disappear so now it is just a statement witout a source.