Mastodon design decision on Quote Toots

Refugees from birdsite missing #QT #QuoteTweet might reflect on conscious design decisions made in Mastodon core, that could be modified in a specific instance. This means that if a poster REALLY wants QT, he or she has the option to move to an instance where that is supported.

Original 2018 Design Decision at https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/cage-the-mastodon/#design-decisions

Pointer from discussion thread from 2000 on Quote Toots https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12753

Just because birdsite declares a unitary design approach doesn’t mean that Mastodon developers haven’t thought about a feature.

Another feature that has been requested almost since the start, and which I keep rejecting is quoting messages. Coming back to my disclaimer, of course it’s impossible to prevent people from sharing screenshots or linking to public resources, but quoting messages is immediately actionable. It makes it a lot easier for people to immediately engage with the quoted content… and it usually doesn’t lead to anything good. When people use quotes to reply to other people, conversations become performative power plays. “Heed, my followers, how I dunk on this fool!” When you use the reply function, your message is broadcast only to people who happen to follow you both. It means one person’s follower count doesn’t play a massive role in the conversation. A quote, on the other hand, very often invites the followers to join in on the conversation, and whoever has got more of them ends up having the upper hand and massively stressing out the other person.

Twitter forces you to choose between two extremes, a protected account and a fully public account. If you have a public account, all your tweets are visible to everyone and infinitely shareable. Mastodon realizes that it’s not something you might always want, though

Where retweets carry the veneer of an endorsement, a quote tweet can do so much more—particularly given that Twitter, in its infinite generosity, engineered the format so that the quoted tweet doesn’t count toward the character limit. The result is that you can go long above whatever you don’t like. But it’s often the short tweets that contribute the least.

… wrote #ClaireMcNear

https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/2/17311616/twitter-retweet-quote-endorsement-function-trolls

A fork of Mastodon is Fedibird, with features more like Twitter. https://github.com/fedibird/mastodon

The lead developer is @noellabo .

The Fedibird site looks to prefer Japanese writers. https://fedibird.com/explore

If anyone knows of English language Fedibird instances, perhaps we could help others to find them.

Reposted from https://qoto.org/@daviding/109354044114984874 .

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#mastodon, #twitter