Mastodon has shared their plan for quote posts. It is well-researched and thoughtful. Yet I have conflicting thoughts on it.
I admire that the team is trying to think through the safety ramifications. I’ve long said we should not blindly copy features from the big silo platforms. A platform like Mastodon that doesn’t have ads also doesn’t need engagement-driven features or anything that amplifies hateful behavior. Already in my opinion Mastodon has copied too much from Twitter.
Quote posts as proposed will be the most visible change to Mastodon’s ActivityPub implementation since the initial rollover from OStatus to ActivityPub. It is not just a new UI and post format, but a system of controlling which posts can be quoted and even optionally notifying users to approve quotes. It adds a lot of complexity.
In Micro.blog, posts aren’t some special kind of “social” post the exists apart from the web. Micro.blog posts are blog posts. Quoting uses <blockquote>, and our web UI for embedding a post uses Quotebacks. The most straightforward way to support Mastodon quote posts when we receive them from Mastodon will be to essentially convert them to use <blockquote>.
You don’t need permission to quote something on the web. It has always been assumed fair use to quote a snippet of someone else’s blog post and add your own commentary. This is a foundational part of link blogs and IndieWeb-style blog conversations. It is already common to embed a Mastodon post by making it a <blockquote> with relevant attribution.
So what is special about Mastodon that requires so much technical infrastructure to support something so simple? I think it’s about speed and reach. For someone living in a social app like Mastodon, a quick boost or quote post that is shared to potentially many followers has an outsized impact relative to how little thought it requires. There is also a culture in Mastodon of treating posts as semi-protected within the Mastodon ecosystem. There is a strong sense of privacy and anonymity.
Consider the following two scenarios. First on Mastodon, the scenario the Mastodon team wants to discourage:
- User clicks “quote post” and adds the comment “This person is terrible”, exposing the post to their followers for the first time. The followers might have no context for this new person.
- Followers immediately see the quote in their timeline and can react. Hit the like button, reply to pile on, boost.
- Suddenly the original person has a problem and unwanted attention. Negative replies flow in from strangers.
Compare to the slower, blog-centric workflow:
- User starts a new blog post and pastes in the part they want to quote.
- At this point they could type “This person is terrible” and call it a day, but… That doesn’t usually happen. Instead, they add a little more commentary. Maybe a little more context or nuance. It is their blog after all, a space on the web with their name on it.
- Followers in RSS readers or some platforms like Micro.blog see the post. They can add a comment or write their own post linking to the original.
It won’t always go this way. Someone on Mastodon could craft a thoughtful quote post, and someone on their blog could post a snide comment. But there is friction on blogs, it’s not quite as effortless to fire off a repost, while there are incentives on social platforms that reward performative behavior. Social media tends to bring out the worst in some people.
Back to Mastodon’s proposed solution. After this change, some things should be better. For users who choose to prevent their posts from being quoted at all within Mastodon, the post could still be “manually” quoted the old fashioned way: copy and paste. ActivityPub’s conventions are a suggestion. Fair use still applies, although users should always be careful not to copy content from private posts meant only for followers.
In a way, this proposal for quote posts is a reflection of the culture of Mastodon, wanting to create a new layer of the web for social interactions, not extending those interactions to blog posts and the rest of the web. It’s a layer that emphasizes federation and communities, where “social” posts are a new structured format on the web. This is not how I would personally approach it when the IndieWeb protocols are sitting right there, but the open web is still stronger because Mastodon exists.
Where does this leave Micro.blog? For now, I plan to support half of Mastodon’s proposal: accepting post quotes via ActivityPub. When you follow a Mastodon user on Micro.blog, you should see their quote posts in your timeline. Quote posts are different than boosts and so need to be included in the timeline. I don’t think any other changes are warranted in Micro.blog for now.
