Quoted posts
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@thisismissem @julian @leroy @renchap I take the same view as @leroy as well -- you can render replies as a rich preview above every post that happens to be a reply. Discord does this, for example. In fact, if Mastodon did this, then they would only need a way to tell when to insert such "quote replies" into timelines and when not to. It could be as simple as a boolean toot:quoteReply = true. With management of the `replies` collection via FEP-7458 (and some proof/stamp mechanism like FEP-0391).
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@silverpill @thisismissem @julian I think you could define a Quote type that is a subclass of Link and use microsyntax to find-and-replace the blockquote with a rich entity with `content` or maybe even `preview`. But this generally makes sense only when you want that rich entity, and not just a "simple" blockquote.
Discourse for example uses [quote] tags kinda like bbcode, and they add metadata something like [quote author:someone,thread:2319,post:69] where the metadata is used in the preview.
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@[email protected] part of the reason we don't do this special syntax is because we (probably) made the conscious decision to keep the composer as simple as possible so that end users wouldn't have to relearn a bespoke syntax.
... but I'm not really sure anymore. My rationale could just be post facto lol
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@julian yeah, if you have a rich composer it's less bad. i don't think i've ever manually authored a quote tag in Discourse, for example. every single time i quote someone it's via the floating button that appears when you select something, or via the dropdown menu option
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For reference, Hubzilla renders both the same way.
If you "share" someone's post (what Mastodon users call a "quote post") is basically just:@[email protected]
[quote]Whatever they said.[/quote]
which gets translated to:@[email protected]
<blockquote>Whatever they said.</blockquote>
If someone quotes someone's post in a forum, it is the same exact thing.
And users can also add their own blockquotes to posts by using the BBCode[quote]tags too.
It's all blockquotes.
Note: This posts uses<code>blocks. This may not render properly on all platforms. -
The ability to arbitrarily and retroactively remove all traces of yourself from a discussion you had in public, via a quasi-persistent medium has always felt to me like a violation of everyone else in the discussion, but I, too, come from the forum space, where you just don’t do that. The microblogging space doesn’t seem to care, and the microblogging space currently dominates fedi. It kind of feels like a culture clash to me, and one of many reasons why forum-fedi and masto-fedi probably don’t need a whole lot of cross-over.
I know there are safety concerns around harassment campaigns and the like, and things should change and evolve in response to stuff like that. And it’s not at all clear to me how something like this interacts with the EU’s Right to be Forgotten. But forum users posting on forums, though distributed, are much less likely to be a disruption to those forums than masto users who don’t even know that they’re posting on forums, while behaving in ways that are normal for their space.
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Scott M. Stolzreplied to [email protected] on last edited by@Kichae Ideally, people should be notified that they are posting to a forum and not replying to a post on an individual channel, that way we can set some expectations in advance.
I am not sure how ActivityPub handles it, but Hubzilla somehow communicates with other Hubzilla instances that a particular channel is a forum. It's probably communicated in webfinger, or something like that.
Just having an icon, tag, or Bootstrap-style badge next to a channel saying "forum" would be helpful. -
@julian said in Quoted posts:
Note that I said "quoted posts", not "quote posts", don't @ me!
After the last WG meeting @[email protected] @[email protected] and I chatted a bit about how NodeBB handles quoted posts, but also in relation to quote posts. I thought that it was an interesting chat that merited further discussion; also because some of it was over my head.
When asked how NodeBB handles blockquotes specifically, I replied that blockquotes themselves are rather simple. We set a copy of the text wrapped in
<blockquote>.The rationale is simple: forums typically represent content in a linear fashion, and quoted posts are a handy way to reinforce subcontext within a topic. A typical topic/thread could have many separate discussions all happening together (aka thread drift), so quotes help others know what you're responding to. We don't have special handling or references to our blockquotes because there is a history in forums of edited blockquotes.
Perhaps you want to have a block quote and add some emphasis?
It's also better netiquette (god, that term is old) to trim down the quote to only the relevant parts.
Another upside is that a copy-paste of a post preserves that post to history. That can be useful if the quoted user tries to edit their post later, etc.
vis-a-vis the concept of "quote posts", which I take to mean an embedded post within a post, allowing for replies, likes, etc. How that is represented via ActivityPub is probably detailed in some FEP, but NodeBB doesn't implement that yet. It's a more complicated mechanism that requires a lot more thinking through, and to be honest, we haven't had the need for that in the 10+ years we've been building NodeBB.
Quotes should involve resources. With the current citation mechanism, if the user deletes the original post, the quoted content will still exist. The ideal mechanism is that if the user deletes the original post, the quoted content should also be deleted. This is very important for the federation system, so I think the citation system should be upgraded to display the quoted content through pid and forum-fedi.
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@panzz I can see your updated username from Mastodon.
It’s interesting how NodeBB seems to be able to handle username changes just fine even through ActivityPub.
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@[email protected] said in Quoted posts:
The ability to arbitrarily and retroactively remove all traces of yourself from a discussion you had in public, via a quasi-persistent medium has always felt to me like a violation of everyone else in the discussion, but I, too, come from the forum space, where you just don’t do that. The microblogging space doesn’t seem to care, and the microblogging space currently dominates fedi. It kind of feels like a culture clash to me, and one of many reasons why forum-fedi and masto-fedi probably don’t need a whole lot of cross-over.
This is a VERY interesting point, and I think it comes from the difference of context between forums and microblogging : A Forum always har a context and community : the message stand by itself, the user is secondary. Microblogging is more a way to communicate yourself ; the message is secondary.
Which makes the crossover a can of worms : A message from a forum published out of contex of the forum discussion to the Microverse, can be as bad as a miss-composed message being published as a forumpost.
On the other side, the value of fedi is in the ability to solve these kinds of context switches. It should be a part of HOW we do fedi.
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@Panzz said in Quoted posts:
Quotes should involve resources. With the current citation mechanism, if the user deletes the original post, the quoted content will still exist. The ideal mechanism is that if the user deletes the original post, the quoted content should also be deleted.
In MOST forum contexts: no way!
Seriously, that would break the fundemental context of a forum. Especially in all areas that follow the GDPR types of privacy law. (Since you are allowed and recomended to delete all your data, if you leave a service). I´m willing to accept there are some areas for forums that mimic SoMe, where this makes sense, but most forums are content- and conversations oriented, and nonone should be able to one-sided sensor a community.
This is a Fedi problem, and need a tailored Fedi solution.
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Could it be that the idea that quoted posts on forums are not rich resources (and thus liable for deletion) are an artifact of an older age of the internet, but at the same time is a feature, not a bug?
100% agreed that in a forum context the ability to quote the text of a post is important. Forum users often extend this in many ways, not limited to:
- Holding a user accountable (by preserving their words from future editing)
- Emphasis of certain portions of text
- Excision of unrelated portions of text
Simply displaying the quoted post as a linked resource robs the end user of all that additional functionality, and that is something I am not sure I want to concede.
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[email protected]replied to Scott M. Stolz last edited by
The issue – as is the case with so many Fediverse headaches – is Mastodon, and its persistent behaviour of obfuscating the nature of the Fediverse itself. They really seem to bend over backwards to hide or distract from the fact that they’re seeing content authored and hosted on other server software. I can’t see them alerting users to the different contexts they’re viewing while they remain the biggest game in town, unfortunately, which means Mastodon users will have no signals that there are different expectations on them when they hit ‘Reply’.
But yeah, as a best practice for everywhere else, that seem like a really good basic courtesy.
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[email protected]replied to Christian Stange last edited by
Microblogs are also treats as ephemeral spaces, which is why people have long been caught off-guard by their old Tweets wrecking their lives. It’s a space where people behave as if they’re having a vocal conversation, and the form of ‘public’ they’re in is like a public park. People are around who could hear, but they have to be at the park and nearby as it’s said to hear. The idea that someone could show up to the park 5 years later and put up a fuss over something that was casually expressed is an impossibility.
People have never treated forums as ephemeral. They’ve always been quasi-permanent spaces, where even the ability to edit your posts or replies is often time gated, or outright disallowed.
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An interesting hybrid version I'm a bit unsure of the technical issues connected to, is offering two seperate parts : the blockquoted text and a signature with a link.
If the resource still exist, give a link back to it, scoping the source, if it has been deleted, delete the link and any reference to source.
It means that we will have quotes that you can't doublecheck the context of. But by simply stripping the text of it original context, you drop it in the context of the post of the blockquote.
The Implementation issues with this model though....
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This is one of those things where it is a culture clash.
Forums are designed for discussions, and that includes quoting what was said. The quotes are purposefully kept intact in case someone else deletes their post and falsely claimed they didn't say that. Whereas micro-blogging platforms like Mastodon are not designed for discussions, and users tend to call anyone that replies to their post a #replyguy and hate being quoted.
Forums and Facebook-style platforms can make these changes to accommodate quotes that can be deleted by the person who was quoted. But the bigger issue is a cultural one. If a person can delete their quote, forum users will purposefully quote them in a manner that cannot be deleted, even if it means just copy and pasting the text, because forums have a culture of holding people accountable for what they post.
I am not sure how you will resolve this cultural issue with technology. There are too many ways to bypass it. -
One thing that would help is if users could tell if they were replying to a forum or not. Because the rules & culture regarding forums are different than the rules & culture on micro-blogging platforms. But most platforms do not indicate this to their users.
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Marcus Rohrmoser 🌻replied to Scott M. Stolz last edited by
Hi @scott,
indeed, #conversation_welcome or #one_way_sermon badges might help, too. -
Scott M. Stolzreplied to Marcus Rohrmoser 🌻 last edited by@Marcus Rohrmoser
Some platforms, like Hubzilla, actually tell you that the thread (conversation) you are commenting on is from a forum. It helps provide context and also lets you know your post will be distributed to forum members in addition to your own followers.
