Note that I said “quoted posts”, not “quote posts”, don’t @ me!
After the last WG meeting @[email protected] @[email protected] and I chatted a bit about how NodeBB handles quoted posts, but also in relation to quote posts. I thought that it was an interesting chat that merited further discussion; also because some of it was over my head.
When asked how NodeBB handles blockquotes specifically, I replied that blockquotes themselves are rather simple. We set a copy of the text wrapped in <blockquote>.
The rationale is simple: forums typically represent content in a linear fashion, and quoted posts are a handy way to reinforce subcontext within a topic. A typical topic/thread could have many separate discussions all happening together (aka thread drift), so quotes help others know what you’re responding to. We don’t have special handling or references to our blockquotes because there is a history in forums of edited blockquotes.
Perhaps you want to have a block quote and add some emphasis?
It’s also better netiquette (god, that term is old) to trim down the quote to only the relevant parts.
Another upside is that a copy-paste of a post preserves that post to history. That can be useful if the quoted user tries to edit their post later, etc.
vis-a-vis the concept of “quote posts”, which I take to mean an embedded post within a post, allowing for replies, likes, etc. How that is represented via ActivityPub is probably detailed in some FEP, but NodeBB doesn’t implement that yet. It’s a more complicated mechanism that requires a lot more thinking through, and to be honest, we haven’t had the need for that in the 10+ years we’ve been building NodeBB.
Little heads-up: So far, Hubzilla renders everything the way I guess it’s intended. Nothing out of the ordinary.
For reference, Hubzilla renders both the same way.
If you “share” someone’s post (what Mastodon users call a “quote post”) is basically just:
@channel@example.com [quote]Whatever they said.[/quote]which gets translated to:
@channel@example.com<blockquote>Whatever they said.</blockquote>If someone quotes someone’s post in a forum, it is the same exact thing.
And users can also add their own blockquotes to posts by using the BBCode
[]tags too.It’s all blockquotes.
Note: This posts uses
<code>blocks. This may not render properly on all platforms.>How that is represented via ActivityPub is probably detailed in some FEP
FEP-e232? I think you can add
contentorsummaryproperty to FEP-e232 link to represent HTML content of a quoteAn interesting hybrid version I’m a bit unsure of the technical issues connected to, is offering two seperate parts : the blockquoted text and a signature with a link.
If the resource still exist, give a link back to it, scoping the source, if it has been deleted, delete the link and any reference to source.
It means that we will have quotes that you can’t doublecheck the context of. But by simply stripping the text of it original context, you drop it in the context of the post of the blockquote.
The Implementation issues with this model though…
One thing that would help is if users could tell if they were replying to a forum or not. Because the rules & culture regarding forums are different than the rules & culture on micro-blogging platforms. But most platforms do not indicate this to their users.
Hi @scott,
indeed, #conversation_welcome or #one_way_sermon badges might help, too.@Marcus Rohrmoser 🌻 Some platforms, like Hubzilla, actually tell you that the thread (conversation) you are commenting on is from a forum. It helps provide context and also lets you know your post will be distributed to forum members in addition to your own followers.
@[email protected] @Christian-Stange @[email protected] I think I disagree that a conversation need mark that it is a “forum”. It explicitly flags that the thread is different from microblogging, but why shouldn’t microblogs mark their conversations instead (I ask purely to play devil’s advocate because it isn’t feasible nor realistic)?
Especially in this case when you yourself said it’s a cultural problem (💯 agreed btw), the distinction is especially meaningless to the end user, who doesn’t give two cents whether they’re replying to a microblog or not.
@julian It’s interesting how different platforms implement things. Some platforms, like Friendica, tell you which platform someone is using by showing a little icon next to their name on all of their posts (Mastodon icon, Hubzilla icon, potentially a NodeBB icon, etc.), whereas Mastodon makes it appear as if everyone is on Mastodon. Some Mastodon users are not even aware that they are talking to people on other platforms.
The reason why I say indicating that it is a forum or group discussion is useful is not just the cultural issue, but also because replies to forum posts are distributed differently than a normal post. You are not just replying to your followers and the person who posted, but also to everyone following the forum (or forum category).
But, this is something that is nice to have, and not needed. It just is useful information to have. And I doubt that platforms like Mastodon will make such a change anyway.
It’s also interesting to see how platforms that pre-date Mastodon implement things versus platforms that came later and are influenced by Mastodon.
@[email protected] I think it’s a neat thing to show the software icon next to a post.
… but at the same time, think about who you want to use your software. Software geeks? Totally on board with that.
… but everyday people won’t know what they’re even looking at, and this (among other items people constantly bring up re: explaining ActivityPub) is all stuff that should be abstracted away from the end user.
It’s not a matter of “before Mastodon” and “after Mastodon”, at all.
It’s not a matter of “before Mastodon” and “after Mastodon”, at all.
I was trying not to state this so bluntly, but basically, platforms that came before Mastodon has blockquotes before Mastodon existed. We did not get rid of them in 2016, and we aren’t getting rid of them now.
So, even if you implement this proposed feature, which is your right, some platforms will stay with the tried and true blockquotes.
@julian By the way, edits don’t appear to be appearing on NodeBB. I fixed a typo, but NodeBB still displays it.
@julian Or, to put it more diplomatically and to give a little context, this argument over blockquotes has been going on for about 8 years now. I don’t think everyone is going to be on board with a single solution.
@[email protected] at it’s core quote posts and block quotes are separate constructs. I have no plans to disallow users from making block quotes (not to mention there’s no way I can even do that).
@julian To be fair, platforms that don’t have quote posts might be interested in this, since they can offer quote posts without the risk.
@julian I don’t think that will matter. People who want a quote that cannot be deleted with figure that out and will pick the method that makes the quote undeletable. It seems like a lot of work for something that people will simply bypass.
This is one of those things where it is a culture clash.
Forums are designed for discussions, and that includes quoting what was said. The quotes are purposefully kept intact in case someone else deletes their post and falsely claimed they didn’t say that. Whereas micro-blogging platforms like Mastodon are not designed for discussions, and users tend to call anyone that replies to their post a #replyguy and hate being quoted.
Forums and Facebook-style platforms can make these changes to accommodate quotes that can be deleted by the person who was quoted. But the bigger issue is a cultural one. If a person can delete their quote, forum users will purposefully quote them in a manner that cannot be deleted, even if it means just copy and pasting the text, because forums have a culture of holding people accountable for what they post.
I am not sure how you will resolve this cultural issue with technology. There are too many ways to bypass it.
This also reminds me of a discussion I had way back when I first joined fedi, with @[email protected] . When mocking up a forum-like frontend for ActivityPub data*, he actually rendered the content of the
inReplyToas a blockquote before the reply, which is actually quite an interesting use-case forinReplyTo!* Also, is there anything more indie hacker than that? lol
@julian Here is one post with screenshots: https://indiehackers.social/@leroy/111746082634398937
I ended up not continuing with this idea. I still really like the simplicity of it BUT it suffers from the fact that people might have auto-deletion of their posts, which can cause gaps in data quite quickly. Which goes against my love of forums (a trove of data for future ‘generations*’).
*generation in this use means a person looking for same knowledge, but it’s new to them
A core pillar was data sovereignty (you as a fediverse user can delete your post, the forum respects that).
BUT the frequency of data deletion may be too much to make the forum usable.
I guess I’m still a little on the fence.
The ability to arbitrarily and retroactively remove all traces of yourself from a discussion you had in public, via a quasi-persistent medium has always felt to me like a violation of everyone else in the discussion, but I, too, come from the forum space, where you just don’t do that. The microblogging space doesn’t seem to care, and the microblogging space currently dominates fedi. It kind of feels like a culture clash to me, and one of many reasons why forum-fedi and masto-fedi probably don’t need a whole lot of cross-over.
I know there are safety concerns around harassment campaigns and the like, and things should change and evolve in response to stuff like that. And it’s not at all clear to me how something like this interacts with the EU’s Right to be Forgotten. But forum users posting on forums, though distributed, are much less likely to be a disruption to those forums than masto users who don’t even know that they’re posting on forums, while behaving in ways that are normal for their space.
@Kichae Ideally, people should be notified that they are posting to a forum and not replying to a post on an individual channel, that way we can set some expectations in advance.
I am not sure how ActivityPub handles it, but Hubzilla somehow communicates with other Hubzilla instances that a particular channel is a forum. It’s probably communicated in webfinger, or something like that.
Just having an icon, tag, or Bootstrap-style badge next to a channel saying “forum” would be helpful.
The issue – as is the case with so many Fediverse headaches – is Mastodon, and its persistent behaviour of obfuscating the nature of the Fediverse itself. They really seem to bend over backwards to hide or distract from the fact that they’re seeing content authored and hosted on other server software. I can’t see them alerting users to the different contexts they’re viewing while they remain the biggest game in town, unfortunately, which means Mastodon users will have no signals that there are different expectations on them when they hit ‘Reply’.
But yeah, as a best practice for everywhere else, that seem like a really good basic courtesy.
@[email protected] said in Quoted posts:
The ability to arbitrarily and retroactively remove all traces of yourself from a discussion you had in public, via a quasi-persistent medium has always felt to me like a violation of everyone else in the discussion, but I, too, come from the forum space, where you just don’t do that. The microblogging space doesn’t seem to care, and the microblogging space currently dominates fedi. It kind of feels like a culture clash to me, and one of many reasons why forum-fedi and masto-fedi probably don’t need a whole lot of cross-over.
This is a VERY interesting point, and I think it comes from the difference of context between forums and microblogging : A Forum always har a context and community : the message stand by itself, the user is secondary. Microblogging is more a way to communicate yourself ; the message is secondary.
Which makes the crossover a can of worms : A message from a forum published out of contex of the forum discussion to the Microverse, can be as bad as a miss-composed message being published as a forumpost.
On the other side, the value of fedi is in the ability to solve these kinds of context switches. It should be a part of HOW we do fedi.
Microblogs are also treats as ephemeral spaces, which is why people have long been caught off-guard by their old Tweets wrecking their lives. It’s a space where people behave as if they’re having a vocal conversation, and the form of ‘public’ they’re in is like a public park. People are around who could hear, but they have to be at the park and nearby as it’s said to hear. The idea that someone could show up to the park 5 years later and put up a fuss over something that was casually expressed is an impossibility.
People have never treated forums as ephemeral. They’ve always been quasi-permanent spaces, where even the ability to edit your posts or replies is often time gated, or outright disallowed.
