I'm still on the fence about mastodon's choice not to notify people when they get quote posted.
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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.
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@polotek yes, client choices do impact one's experience of mastodon and the fediverse, but they are not mastodon's choices.
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@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).
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@thisismissem @renchap @polotek The client I use with our Mastodon instance renders links as actual quotes. Any client can choose to do that.
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@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?
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@[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. -
@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.
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@thisismissem @polotek Since the link preview is in fact fetched, and the instance knows its own domain, it would be possible to create notifications from that. But only if someone on the instance follows the quoting account, of course.
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@raucao @polotek it's not fetched whilst we post, it's fetched asynchronously from that.
So we'd somehow need to fetch the link preview, figure out the preview is actually for a fediverse server, get the link in JSON-LD representation, then create & send an activity to it's author (not sure what activity, since there's no Quote activity)
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@thisismissem @polotek Not sure I follow. I meant that if a Mastodon instance is fetching a link preview and sees that it's a link to one of its own local posts, then it would be fairly easy to turn that into a notification. You wouldn't even need to turn it into an activity to send elsewhere I guess.
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@raucao @thisismissem for the record, I do understand the technical problems around this. The context that this is a quote post comes from the application. The protocol can't know the significance of a link in a text post. This is true in centralized networks as well. But they have one advantage. Because it's centralized, they can inspect the url and know what it is because they control the domain.
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@raucao @thisismissem that's not what I'm hung up on personally. I just wanted to make sure I understood Emelia's comment about "tracking links".
When it came time for Twitter to solve this, they did the same thing. A) update the protocol to add contextual metadata. E.g. "in_reply_to". B) Make the intention from the client more explicit by having the user click "quote" button. C) in the absence of context, inspect the text and make reasonable assumptions.
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@raucao @thisismissem the challenge with a federated system and protocol is that it's much more difficult to make "reasonable assumptions". We don't have the same signals about the provenance of links or the intention of users. So it's a harder problem to solve.
