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Simon Willison

Here's an idea for Mastodon quote posts which I don't think would upset any of the people opposed to quoting: allow me to quote just my own posts

This would enable one of my key purposes of quoting: it would allow me to create navigation paths between my own content, including letting me reply to someone to point them to something I had previously answered

6 comments
Simon Willison

The only downside I can think of here is usability: it's not going to be easy for people to understand WHY they can quote themselves but nobody else

Bill Plein🌶

@simon Do you think your vision of a Mastodon quote toot would work with ActivityPub which has no concept of a quote toot?

I’m not being argumentative. I haven’t tried to think it through.

If it’s possible just to display the activity as a quote toot via Mastodon clients, without asking ActivityPub to do something new, then great. But if it requires a change in AP behavior, that’s a while different story.

Simon Willison

@bplein I have to admit I've not dug into the implementation details enough to know if this could be done without an ActivityPub update - I've been assuming AP is extensible through extra bits of JSON but maybe I'm completely off base about that

Bill Plein🌶

@simon Not sure if Masto clients talk AP to Masto servers. Guessing they don’t directly?

It may be more implementable to have a client that goes through shenanigans to implement a quote toot that isn’t tracked like a boost or Twitter retweet.

The client could provide a link and create a screenshot and emulate it. Make that one button approach in app.

Fabiano

@simon why would users only be able to quote themselves?
I'd like both ideally

MudMan

@simon It's the same issue for the proposed "opt-out" alternative. You need to error out people who try to quote a post that is restricted. And I'm guessing locking after the fact would lead to broken quotes.

"Not trivial" is right.

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