"I used to 'admire' you a lot. So I decided to be rude as fuck in our very first exchange ever. And when you responded with a mild rebuke, it made me realize that I was wrong about liking anything you've ever said."

The internet is an absolutely wild place.
https://phpc.social/@lewiscowles1986/113427322677887156

@lewiscowles1986 Lewis this is bullshit. Literally all I did was say the same thing you said. And I didn't even call it "nonsense". Your message was rude and uncalled for. If you actually "admired" me at all, you would've given me more consideration on our first time engaging. Get the fuck outta here man. I didn't ask for your admiration and I'm not gonna lose any sleep over you taking it back.

@lewiscowles1986 I just learned you exist Lewis. This is the only take of yours that I have, but I'm not particularly impressed with it. Thanks for stopping by.

@hrefna @aredridel @joelving @lewiscowles1986 @Azuaron it's the same energy that has folks blame Black people every time Republicans win an election. Even though we're definitely not the reason that happens.

@hrefna @aredridel @joelving @lewiscowles1986 @Azuaron this conversation is fascinating to me. For the record, I don't see people saying "they are the same". I do think people get real comfortable with shitting on everyone just so they don't mistakenly leave anyone out. "Yeah Blackstone is worse. But it's equally easy for me to condemn a person renting out a room. So why wouldn't I do that too?"

@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

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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?

@justinfagnani it's bad at both tbh.

What mastodon client are you using? The official one?

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

It sounds like I need to evolve my thinking a bit. Whenever I make statements about the intentionality behind some of mastodon's feature decisions, it turns out I'm wrong and people show up to correct me. I don't mind that. But I'm realizing that I'd actually like to see more opinionated decisions about what they want the experience to be.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/113409237333955809

@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.

@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.

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.