I'm still on the fence about mastodon's choice not to notify people when they get quote posted.
-
@polotek I'm never sure when to tag people in, even after getting the okay to manually QP. Etiquette makes a weird band-aid for in-progress infrastructure.
(I personally would love a single notification when a QP happens but NEVER to get pings from the subsequent conversation unless I actively tag in.)
-
@renchap @thisismissem @polotek Correction: "control who can quote you in a way that people see it as a quote in the UI of official Mastodon GmbH client apps". Everyone else can still quote you and see it as a quote if they use other clients.
-
-
@trwnh for the record, I believe that the user experience is way more "real" than protocol decisions. Quote posts are a thing because people want them to be a thing. How well they are actually supported by the protocol is incidental.
That said, the fediverse is unique in the sense that different people can opt into or out of different experiences based on the same data. I'm just musing out loud about some of those tradeoffs.
-
-
@thisismissem @renchap I mean. It is a decision. Choosing not to implement is a decision. It seems that I'm frequently mistaken about the intentionality behind the priority decisions that mastodon has made. It seems like the answer to everything is "we're definitely going to do that, we just haven't yet." Honestly I'd prefer to see more of an opinion about these things.
But more importantly. The mastodon experience is not only what the official client does.
-
@polotek @renchap right, but what third-party clients do or not do isn't Mastodon making decisions. When you've a team of 3 people, you need to decide what to prioritize, because you can't work on all the things all the time.
Grouped Notifications were first, Quote Posts next, because that's how the funding flowed.
-
@polotek if i feel like i'm going to vehemently disagree or blunder into being a reply guy, or anything else where i feel like i'm definitely not adding anything, i quote post. in these contexts, not sending the person a notification seems good?
-
@thisismissem I think what I'm saying is that often when people say "mastodon" they're not only referring to what those 3 people are doing. This thing is already way bigger than those 3 people. That has been part of my critique for a while now. I understand that the shorthand of just saying "mastodon" is going to continue to cause confusion. I'll try to find some other way to talk about it so it doesn't keep activating this same exchange.
-
@ironchamber right. That's what I prefer. The quote post should be understand as starting an offshoot conversation. The OP is welcome to join or not. But ideally it's not taken as direct engagement by default. I'm not sure if it's possible to navigate that all the time though.
-
This goes back to something I've said before:
People's impression of a network is not just the 1P clients. It is a "mastodon feature" because when you are using "mastodon clients" to connect to a "mastodon server" that is the experience of users, regardless of who made what decision.
But I would note: if mastodon hadn't actively _fought_ the implementation of this functionality for so long, it would probably have helped the perception here.
-
-
@polotek right, but you did frame it as "mastodon's choice" that's all I'm suggesting isn't right, because what clients do or don't do isn't mastodon's choice.
See: reporting basically being non-existent in Ivory; we've tried to encourage them to do the right thing, but they haven't cared enough yet.
-
@hrefna @thisismissem I mean the fact that many people are told to get a third party client very shortly after joining mastodon says so much. The default experience is not the recommended one.
-
@thisismissem yeah I understand. I'm going to work on being more intentional about discussing the evolution of the fedi ecosystem. It's easy to use shorthand. But it probably causes more confusion than anything else.
-
@polotek yes, client choices do impact one's experience of mastodon and the fediverse, but they are not mastodon's choices.
-
@polotek @thisismissem the decision to work on quote posts has been done a bit less than a year ago. Then we got NGI to fund it, and we started the work a few weeks ago because we did not had the time before (finishing grouped notifications and releasing 4.3 took a lot of time).
-
@thisismissem @renchap @polotek The client I use with our Mastodon instance renders links as actual quotes. Any client can choose to do that.
-
@thisismissem @raucao I'm not sure what you mean by "we can't track linking to things".
I assume you mean the case where my post lands on some other masto instance. Someone on that instance chooses to quote post it. But my instance doesn't have a way to know when that happens. (Unless I'm following that person?)
Is that right?
