The various issues with quote-posts on Mastodon that nobody on Mastodon is aware of; CW: long (almost 6,800 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, Mastodon looking bad in comparison with the rest of the Fediverse, quote-post meta
Okay, everyone, sit down. I'll tell you a few things about Mastodon's quote-post feature that you know nothing about. Definitely not if all you know is Mastodon. Oh, and by the way, in case you don't know yet in spite of following me: The Fediverse is not only Mastodon.
Mastodon has been quote-post-able for as long as it has been around
Eugen Rochko is bringing quote-posts to Mastodon. But he is not bringing quote-posts to the Fediverse. The Fediverse has had quote-posts for 15 years.
It was Mike Macgirvin who introduced quote-posts to the Fediverse in July, 2010, when he launched something called Mistpark back then and Friendica today (https://friendi.ca, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica). That was five and a half years before Mastodon was launched.
In fact, when Mastodon was launched, it immediately federated itself with Friendica and with Hubzilla, a fork of a fork of Friendica by Friendica's own creator which has quote-posts, too. So when Mastodon was launched, it immediately became possible to quote-post Mastodon toots. Not on Mastodon itself, but on Friendica and Hubzilla.
Just about everything that isn't Mastodon has already got quote-posts right now
Here are a few (but not even all) Fediverse server applications that already have quote-posts:
And they're all part of the Fediverse which means that they're all connected to Mastodon. People on all of these can theoretically read your Mastodon toots. And people on all of these can theoretically quote-post your Mastodon toots.
Mastodon's quote-post opt-in is not a water-tight defence against being quote-posted
So you can choose not to be quote-posted. But you can only choose not to be quote-posted by Mastodon users. This opt-in does not work with the rest of the Fediverse.
First of all, that's because Mastodon's quote-post feature is not compatible with anything else out there. Mastodon's developers have chosen to re-invent the quote-posting wheel from scratch. They've intentionally chosen to do so in a way that's completely incompatible with everything else out there.
Their intention was to reinforce Mastodon's appearance to its own users as the one and only Fediverse and ActivityPub gold standard and to make Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon, Mitra, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams), Forte etc. look broken. It's part of their plan to keep Mastodon users on Mastodon in the wake of Mastodon's market share in the Fediverse shrinking.
Also, they did not publish any specifications on their quote-post implementation, so even those non-Mastodon developers who are fast enough didn't have a chance to implement support for Mastodon's opt-in.
This means that even if you've set your posts to un-quote-post-able on Mastodon, everything I've listed above can still quote-post you with no resistance.
Absolute Fediverse-wide protection against being quote-posted is impossible
And don't get your hopes high that the day will come when nobody on the Fediverse will be able to quote-post you, whether they're on Mastodon or not. Such a setting is technologically impossible.
Who says that? Mike Macgirvin says that. The guy who launched Friendica and brought quote-posts to the Fediverse 15 years ago, remember? This guy has built the Fediverse's most elaborate, most complex, most fine-grained, most advanced permissions system into (streams) and Forte.
These two have reply control, the kind of which you couldn't image in your wildest dreams. I'm serious. They have permissions settings for almost everything on two or three levels, for your whole channel, individually per contact and sometimes even per post or per file or folder in the file storage.
But they don't have quote-post permission settings. Because that's impossible to enforce Fediverse-wide. And even if it was possible, it'd be pointless. If they can't quote-post you, they'll copy-paste you. If they can't copy-paste you either because they're on a phone, they'll post screenshots of your toots.
Mike also says, there is exactly one way to keep people from quote-posting you, and that's by not posting in public. Unfortunately, unlike what he has created, Mastodon has little between "public" and "DM", if anything.
Mastodon cannot quote-post the non-Mastodon Fediverse
This may be the big surprise: It has recently been discovered by chance that Mastodon's quote-post feature only works with Mastodon toots.
On the one hand, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Sharkey, Friendica, Hubzilla etc. can quote-post just about everything that comes in from Mastodon. But on the other hand, no Mastodon 4.5 user will be able to quote-post anything from either of these. Or from Pixelfed or PeerTube or Loops or Castopod or WriteFreely or whatever.
That's because Mastodon is looking for a quote-post opt-in. But nothing else in the Fediverse supports Mastodon's quote-post opt-in, also seeing as it's still officially in development. And it's highly unlikely that everything in the Fediverse will adopt another piece of non-standard, proprietary Mastodon tech.
"Quote" actually means something else
Lastly, Mastodon has the audacity to call this feature "quote".
A "quote" is something else. Remember forums? Like, bulletin-board forums with subforums and all? Where posts are quoted in follow-ups, entirely or only partially? That's what a quote is. That has got nothing to do with quote-posts.
Why I say that there's a difference? Because I also say that Friendica has had both quotes and quote-posts.
It has had them for 15 years, both quotes (which it calls "quotes", go figure) and quote-posts (which it calls "quoted shares", and which include the original author of the quoted post, complete with their profile picture and a clickable link to them, as well as a clickable link to the original post).
Hubzilla has both. (streams) has both. Forte has both. And I wouldn't be surprised if other Fediverse server software had both, too.
The irony is that Mastodon itself has been able to render actual quotes since version 4.0 from October, 2022. At the same time, it will continue to be unable to render any quote-posts done outside of Mastodon for the foreseeable future.
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#mastodon #fediverse #activitypub #hubzilla #friendica #forte #streams
