I'm still on the fence about mastodon's choice not to notify people when they get quote posted.
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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.
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@thisismissem @raucao to answer this specific question, my initial assumption was that mastodon would do something like this. With the challenge being that C) doesn't really work in a federated environment. But the other two things should probably still happen.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/113411468788918556 -
@polotek @thisismissem @raucao
can't you inspect a URL and detect if it's a mastodon post? yeah during link previews.
but yeah in the UI it could be more intentional
or, if your mastodon host caches the format of other host's posts, you would know e.g. "xyz.com/notes/post123" vs "other.com/@username/post123"
(that could be a nodeinfo piece of information - then you pre-load that on any encountered host and notify local users if local posts are quoted by external posts in the inbox)
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infinite love ⴳreplied to Marco Rogers last edited by
@polotek oh i meant less that they don’t exist at a protocol level and more that they don’t exist at a semantic or ontological level. which is to say: when people talk about “quote posts”, they are drawing from their experience with twitter’s implementation of converting trailing links to tweets into embedded previews. twitter then went on to auto-notify anyone who got linked, as well as add a button to auto-inject a link at the end of your tweet after you send it.
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infinite love ⴳreplied to infinite love ⴳ last edited by
@polotek so if we want to make “quote posts” real, we need to unpack and define each of the components that make up a “quote post” in theory.
this is where the “auto-notify someone they’ve been linked to” thing comes up. i think this is something that should be the choice of the person doing the quoting. in current terms, clients that support client-side“quote posts” might inject a mention of the person alongside the link to their post.
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infinite love ⴳreplied to infinite love ⴳ last edited by
@polotek It would be more than a little weird if Mastodon started to parse every single received post for a link, then if it’s a link to some local status, generate a notification for that user. I think such behavior would get me to not only stop using Mastodon entirely, but also completely block any and all Mastodon servers from following me as long as they implemented this behavior.
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Emelia 👸🏻replied to Marco Rogers last edited by [email protected]
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@risottobias @polotek @raucao post IRIs and post URLs are not necessarily the same, you'd still need some way to know "this is a fediverse server" and "this is the post IRI (the json version)
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@thisismissem @polotek @raucao something to encode in nodeinfo.
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@risottobias @polotek @raucao right, but we can't be hitting /.well-known/nodeinfo for every link posted?
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Risotto Votedreplied to Emelia 👸🏻 last edited by [email protected]
@thisismissem @polotek @raucao at the very least for every server you get a post from, at least once.
or from a gossip'd metadata file that every node builds up and you could get from any node (which would include the server that quote posts, after their first quote post of your server)
