I'm still on the fence about mastodon's choice not to notify people when they get quote posted.
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I'm still on the fence about mastodon's choice not to notify people when they get quote posted.
In the past I wanted it this way. Because I believe getting notified created bad incentives.
"Is this person talking to me or about me?"
"Is this a dunk? I don't know, but I better assume it is."
Anyway, right now I'm thinking about the tradeoff. I think I'm missing a lot of discourse because I don't get notified of people commenting on my posts.
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Mastodon has some signals about "engagement". But it's clear that this platform wants to de-emphasize that as an important metric for it's own sake. I'm sort of okay with that. But I believe we still need to address related issues like discoverability and network effects. Those are actually important for the growth of a network.
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@polotek wait, what? Mastodon hasn't made that decision. Client's have done "quoting" via expanding links that happen to be on fediverse servers.
Mastodon's Quote Posts FEP is absolutely including the notifications and all the safety controls.
cc @renchap perhaps you can explain better than I on this.
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@polotek i'm curious, do you think that linking to a web resource should automatically notify the author of that resource, or should it be the choice of the person linking to that resource? because i see two aspects here:
1) "quotes" aren't a real thing, they're just links that might have a fancy preview
2) you can choose to mention/address (or not!) the person you are quoting, in the same way that you can reply to someone without notifying them -
@thisismissem @polotek This is correct, at the moment Mastodon does not support quote posts. Some clients implemented it "client-side" by adding “RE: <url>" at the bottom of the post, and support rendering this as a quote post, but this is a hack.
We are currently working on quote posts, and once implemented in Mastodon proper it will support getting notified about them, and provide a way to control who can quote you. We plan to publish more on the topic in the coming weeks. -
@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.)
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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?
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@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.
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@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.
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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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
