I'm still on the fence about mastodon's choice not to notify people when they get quote posted.

Marco Rogers

@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.

Emelia 👸🏻

@raucao @renchap @polotek uuh, no? It'd just be a link then.

And sure, anyone can link to you.

Marco Rogers

@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.

Emelia 👸🏻

@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.

esmevane, sorry

@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?

Marco Rogers

@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.

Marco Rogers

@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.

Hrefna (DHC)

@thisismissem @thisismissem

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 @renchap

Emelia 👸🏻

@hrefna @polotek @renchap definitely agree on that point.

Emelia 👸🏻

@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.

Marco Rogers

@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.

Marco Rogers

@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.

Emelia 👸🏻

@polotek yes, client choices do impact one's experience of mastodon and the fediverse, but they are not mastodon's choices.

Renaud Chaput

@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).

Râu Cao ⚡

@thisismissem @renchap @polotek The client I use with our Mastodon instance renders links as actual quotes. Any client can choose to do that.

Emelia 👸🏻

@raucao @renchap @polotek yes, but that isn't a native quote post. That's just your client giving you a preview of some link.

We can't track linking to things, at least not in a way that'd be at all ethical or good or advisable to do. (pingbacks come to mind)

Marco Rogers

@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?

smitten

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
There's two meanings of quote post, a 'native' one is fedi software creating a special kind of post with additional metadata saying what's quoted. when I do this in Sharkey it does notify the person I'm quoting, as if they were mentioned. mastodon doesn't do these yet, no matter what client you use.

there's also clients that treat links as if they were quotes. It's UI sugar for a regular post containing a link, there's nothing special the mastodon server is doing since it's client side, there's no notification to OP unless they are mentioned in it. mastodon can make these because they are just regular posts made by a client that auto-includes a URL when the 'quote' button is pressed.

Marco Rogers

@smitten I understand all of these distinctions. I was asking specifically about Emelia's comment about tracking links to make sure I understood it the way they intended.

Emelia 👸🏻

@polotek @raucao well if the "quote" is just a link, what should we actually do? It's indisguishable from any other link until the link preview is fetched.