Quote posts on Mastodon are finally happening.

Mastodon is officially rolling out quote posts. Starting next week, you’ll see an option to quote another user by selecting the repost — or “boost” — button, allowing you to add your thoughts to someone else’s post.

The decentralized platform initially planned not to launch quote posts over concerns that they could be used for harassment or to take someone out of context. Mastodon reversed this decision in February, saying a lack of quote posts might discourage people from joining the fediverse.

    • Zachariah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      131·
      23 hours ago

      Mastodon is a subset of the fediverse.
      If something is in Mastodon, it’s in the fediverse.

    • Zak@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      21 hours ago

      It is likely most other software will be able to consume them.

      This highlights what I believe to be a poor choice in the design of BlueSky’s AT Protocol; ActivityPub software is usually liberal in what it accepts and displays, while ATProto enforces schemas (“lexicon”).

      • irelephant [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        19 hours ago

        It usually comes down to a difference in vision, the fediverses schtick is that you can follow Reddit from Twitter or whatever, whereas on atproto you use a different appview for different formats, like frontpage.fyi for links, and whtwnd.net for blogging.

        • Zak@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          17 hours ago

          It’s a difference in vision, but I don’t like BlueSky’s vision here.

          Combining the Reddit-like and Twitter-like experiences in one place is a little awkward, but following a blog or a Youtube-like from a Twitter-like isn’t. Having the option to switch to a more optimal appview is great, but realistically a lot more people would follow a blog from BlueSky than would use their BlueSky identity to sign into WhiteWind.

          • irelephant [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            17 hours ago

            Well, it’s a bit more than just using their identity to sign in, data is also stored on their PDS.

            It’s entirely possible to make a server that accepts several different lexicons, wafrn plans on doing this for articles.

            • Zak@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              17 hours ago

              When a substantial fraction of users are actually using an appview with that trait, that will be great.

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    21 hours ago

    FWIW this was always an ideological choice, not a technical one. Masto users saw how quote-posts were used on other platforms to generate harassment, doxxing, dogpiling, etc. and chose not to include the feature. It’s hard to say whether it has had a cooling effect on those, but it seems like most people on Masto consider the benefits to outweigh the costs.

  • 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦@rblind.comEnglish
    43·
    21 hours ago

    How do those of us who loathe the horrific and proven bad idea of quote posts, and also refuse to use Mastodon, opt out of this terrible misfeature? Will blocking anyone who quote posts me and defederating from their instance remove the quote?

    • tomenzgg@midwest.socialEnglish
      5·
      19 hours ago

      So part of the approach they’re using is this idea of permissions (at a technical level, it’s using the permission system that GoToSocial has been innovating on).

      So, theoretically, they should not be able to quote-post you until given the green light from you.

      I’ve noticed that quote-posts which come across my Mastodon timeline from implementations which don’t use this permissions system have now been displaying the quoted post as just the message, “This post is pending approval from the original author,” (I expect since most previously-existing implementations of the feature didn’t use said permission system, any).