@darius I run a few bots and I 100% get the desire for this!
I think a Twitter quote tweet (at least originally) is internally just a regular tweet with two newlines and a URL at the end(?). If Hometown did it this way, then it would render on non-HT servers as a regular web link, that's fine.
@touk yup that's the idea, have it degrade gracefully to a basic link