I don’t think Mastodon is “bad” for adding quotes and full text search.
In fact, I’ve been advocating that they add that for awhile.
However Mastodon cannot and should not be all things to all people. If you don’t want quoted posts and full text search, you should still have a space on the Fediverse.
@atomicpoet Me wonders if there could be a way for Mastodon to have an optional ‘quiet quotes’ feature, where the option to quote a particular person is off limits?
Similar to ‘protected accounts.’ Or back over among the ‘tree tops’ where there was the option to forbid DMs to someone if ya weren’t following them.
@atomicpoet My guess is that if server owners can change the character limit, they'd also be able to change user discoverability and the existence of quote-toots... but I'm really not sure! It's an interesting question.
Chris, can you or @evan or other fediverse old hands fill a gap that haunts me?
When I first saw Mastodon and ActivityPub, I sensed it was just living within its design constraints. It isn't as funded and monolithic as Twitter, so it doesn't do Twitter.
For example, the Fediverse can't fund centralized record of its total history, so searches are spotty and pulling long threads together may be tricky.
Is anything written that spells out the design tradeoffs that were made?
@Vic Uzumeri @Chris Trottier @Evan Prodromou Even if Mastodon introduces full-text search, that doesn't mean that it'll cover exactly 100% of the Fediverse.
This is technically impossible. Every new instance of every project out there that counts as part of the Fediverse would have to report its existence to 20,000+ other instances as soon as it starts up for the first time so they can start crawling it.
I mean, if I set up my own (streams) instance, for example, a full-text Fediverse search that covers literally 100% of the Fediverse would have to know what's going on on my instance within a split-second of the Web server coming alive. For my first post on my admin channel could be of importance for someone somewhere on Mastodon.
@atomicpoet That's not how social media design works, though. It's not about not being able to search yourself, it's about not being searchable and the search not driving hositle posting. It's not about not being able to QT, it's about callout QTs not being the main mode of interaction.
You can't make all social media to all people, the absent features are part of the design. Which is why nobody cares that those features are already availabl ein other applications.
@atomicpoet For people posting here, the Fediverse design is Mastodon's design.
Again, nobody cares that there are multiple apps you can use where you can take a Mastodon post and quote it. They care that on the aggregate QTs aren't driving the conversation because that isn't the dominant mode of interaction.
This is a frequent divide, between the tech-minded federation ideologues and the actual usage of it as a socia media platform.
@atomicpoet@fediversenews interesting. What do you think about implementing full text search? I suspect it can be a double edge sword, a useful tool but also easily abused.
@gpowerf@fediversenews Any server software that positions itself as the mainstream of the Fediverse should implement features that are deemed essential for the mainstream.
So what we do here when you create an identity is let you choose a privacy role. This sets up a bunch of permissions related stuff including search and search tags. You can change this later if you want in your settings and open it to the world or just friends or nobody. We had to do this incidentally because the searches provide ActivityStreams Collections and are federated. It's one model of how this could work. There will most likely be others before people agree on it.
@mike@fediversenews This is essentially role-based authorization, which the XACML language was designed for. The challenge of such schemes is making them end-user friendly…or even end-user-possible.
I would expect a feature flag on installation/config. Given how much discussion there's been about safety, I actually that the implementation will be good (until proven otherwise, I guess).
@atomicpoet@fediversenews I am reasonably sure both those features will be opt-out, and maybe even opt-in, so I really don't think a fork will be needed.
@dgoldsmith@atomicpoet@fediversenews An entire fork requires significant effort to maintain. If someone is really motivated… but I hope that we can avoid a “fight to the fork”, it's neat if you can toggle quotes on or off and even if it isn't… there are mastodon alternatives.
@atomicpoet@fediversenews the problem with the major platform implementing QT is that no where will be safe, because the QT threat cones from the QTer use side, not the QTed one, and there is not way to prevent being QTed.
Important to many (including me) who feel that the classical no-QT and no-search restrictions are liberating, not limiting. Mastodon now abandons these restrictions. Non-Mastodon alternatives if anything adopt even weaker customs.
What to do if the classical restrictions matter to me? No easy answers, but I will consider a whole range of options. Your thoughts will be welcome.
@the_roamer@atomicpoet@fediversenews There are popular Mastodon instances out there still running variants of v3, so don’t have post editing, hashtag following or other v4 features. Just sticking with the current version is therefore an option. Not one I’d recommend, but a low effort way of opting out of unwanted new features.
@JorgeStolfi
It is kind of founding principles predicated on fears of being harassed for belonging to some targeted group. Right or wrong they contributed to its development. I am not sure why we, recent joiners are forcing these features. As @atomicpoet has pointed out many times there are other platforms that offer these features. People can join those who any loss. This has the added benefit of diversifying the Fediverse. @fediversenews
But I still don't quite understand how quoting contributes to harassment.
I am guessing that the relevant scenario is: Bad Bob sees a toot T1 from Vulnerable Vicky, quotes the toot to his Filthy Followers, and these then post dozens of nasty replies to T1. Is this the problem?
@JorgeStolfi if I reply to you in order to harass you or bring my followership on top of you, I have to alert them of the conversation, my desire, your information, and how to best target you.
By quote-tweeting, you are able to identify most of that stuff all in one go. It's blasted out to anyone who watches your tweets however they watch them... and it has an easy way to click through and lump on.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for or against them - I'm simply giving you an example in which a quote could be used to bring about harassment or abusive behavior.
As a feature, copy/paste circumvents "QT" and screengrab captures "details" if you want to make it one-directional.
It really highlights the importance of having a diversity of platforms: any platform is likely to change and evolve, as is any user's needs and wants.
Robustness here would require some minimum degree of standing diversity.
With all of mastodon getting QTs and search (depending on speed to upgrade) that’s a pretty sudden pressure for feature diversity … unless it’s all configurable on an instance by instance basis.
@atomicpoet@fediversenews Do you know if the quote toot function could be turned off? I was curious and tried to go to the GitHub repo + documentation but couldn't find anything... If there is a config option it'd be really nice for some instances to just turn them off!
It's very hard to do within Mastodon, it's even harder within the ActivityPub-based Fediverse, and it's out-right impossible in those parts of the Fediverse that are based on other protocols and require ActivityPub "translators". I know because I'm residing in these parts.
See, Hubzilla doesn't have a quote button. Quotes can be achieved in two ways.
Either you select the part of a post which you want to quote, then you click on the reply button. This only works with comments, not with first posts; Hubzilla distinguishes between these two.
Or you have to do it manually: type the Webfinger ID of whomever you want to quote, type [quote], copy-paste in what you want to quote, type [/quote]. This works with first posts as well as comments.
There are many other, "unofficial" ways of quoting someone. For example, using [quote][/quote] tags, but not mentioning the user. Or using quotation marks instead of [quote][/quote]. Or using > instead of [quote][/quote], Usenet-style.
A quote block would have to work in such a way that Hubzilla would have to discover that the post in the making contains a) parts of a post from someone who doesn't want to be quoted and b) [quote][/quote] tags or anything else that indicates a quote and then grey out and deactivate the submit button until the quoted text is deleted.
For this to work, Hubzilla would require a sort of database of literally all user accounts in the whole Fediverse, down to personal FoundKey instances spun up one second ago, who don't want to be quoted.
Now, keep in mind that, unlike Mastodon, Hubzilla is not based on ActivityPub. Hubzilla uses its own protocol, Zot. Why doesn't it use ActivityPub? Because Hubzilla is from 2012, four years older than Mastodon and six years older than the ActivityPub standard. And Zot makes things possible that ActivityPub can only dream of, that's why Hubzilla won't switch. ActivityPub only works through a translator add-on. It's optional per hub (Mastodon: = instance, = server) and then optional with opt-in per channel (Mastodon: quasi = account).
This means that Hubzilla's internal workings are not bound to adhere to ActivityPub standards. Even less is Hubzilla obliged to follow Mastodon's very own design decisions.
Sidenote: I sincerely hope you didn't discover through this post of mine that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon.
If there's a URL then you can link and comment upon the content and possibly get some kind of preview of it on some other web page, cos that's the point of the web.
If it's treated as a URI then it might be referenced in interesting ways which includes annotation. All the arguments about 'quoting' are about UI and useability which might have value in themselves but banning links, anchors is just anti-web.
Friendica, Hubzilla, the now-dead Zotlabs projects and (streams) use BBcode for post formatting, and so they do quotes the good old-fashioned bulletin board/forum way. It gets translated into Rich Text by whichever ActivityPub connector they use.
If I were to quote you, it'd look like this in the post editor:
[quote]If there's a URL then you can link and comment upon the content and possibly get some kind of preview of it on some other web page, cos that's the point of the web.
If it's treated as a URI then it might be referenced in interesting ways which includes annotation. All the arguments about 'quoting' are about UI and useability which might have value in themselves but banning links, anchors is just anti-web.[/quote]
I could also mention you in the quote tag.
[quote=@[url=https://mastodon.social/@simon_lucy]Simon Lucy[/url]]If there's a URL then you can link and comment upon the content and possibly get some kind of preview of it on some other web page, cos that's the point of the web.
If it's treated as a URI then it might be referenced in interesting ways which includes annotation. All the arguments about 'quoting' are about UI and useability which might have value in themselves but banning links, anchors is just anti-web.[/quote]
It's basically technology that's two decades old already, only adapted for the Federated Social Web in the early 2010s.
(Disclaimer: If mastodon.social understands quote tags now, but it doesn't understand "don't parse the formatting code between these tags" tags, and you see these as actual quotes, I can't help it. Ideally, nothing should happen because these BBcode examples won't get translated into Rich Text, and Mastodon doesn't understand BBcode.)
I don’t care about quotes, but I prefer to opt out of full text search. Is having my posts unlisted by default good enough to achieve that? Or do I need to go full lock?🔒 Do you know, does search include my display name or bio?
@Micheleyee@atomicpoet@fediversenews I can't see any unlisted posts when I search any specific words, though it seems limited or embryonic at the moment. I found you by searching for your name, but that may just be 'cos you replied to this post.
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