quote + boost

[triplefox]

This turned out to be a major Twitter feature: being able to inline the text of a retweet while adding your own. It was done by manually copy-pasting the text before a feature was developed. How to go about implementing this, or an equivalent? How would it work with our visibility rules?

[clayote]

1. When a toot contains a link to another toot, embed a preview of the latter in the former
2. Some kind of interface affordance, button or menu entry idk, to automagically copypaste a link to the toot your mouse is on into the toot editor, then put your cursor before that
3. Notification when someone quotes your toot this way

[Gargron]

Could be something like OEmbed, then the same mechanism could be used for embedding youtube/soundcloud/GNU social statuses/anything that supports OEmbed.

[hikari-no-yume]

How would this work with federation? Has anything in the wider network implemented this?

[hikari-no-yume]

quitter.no apparently can even quote tweets (that is, from Twitter). Dunno if that's standard.

[Gargron]

Okay, so GNU social quoting tweets is the same mechanism as any link (it does an OEmbed), but for actual fediverse statuses it seems to use a slightly different mechanism, and I'm thinking I might want to specialize it too, since it'd be useful to create notifications about quotes, and also have a little more control about displaying them in the UI.

[ghost]

i would suggest making a quote tweet be noticeable as a reply to the post, that also has the link and OEmbed view of the toot. this would happen even if the user just copied a link to the toot, ideally, to make it so people can't effectively do what not implementing quote-toots would do, namely, allow people to know when people are talking about them.

[pief]

Would love to see this, too! +1

[Swipe650]

Any progress on this? Would love to see this implemented.

[ghost]

@Swipe650 yes me too, it would be a great new user-oriented feature. No milestone though.

[El-Gavy]

+1 !

[BasixKOR]

It is what I need.

[clayote]

I would also be satisfied with some way to make it "stick" when I boost something and then post about it -- that is, make sure the boosted post and mine will appear next to one another in the timeline.

[fenarinarsa]

This is actually a major feature on Twitter and it's missing badly on Mastodon. I hope it will be implemented soon :)

[Cassolotl]

I like quote-boosting and no harassment, so I'm wondering whether experienced admins would be willing to share their thoughts on the possibility of quote-boosting being allowed, and there being instance rules that say "no using quote-boosts for evil" or something like that?

Edit: This is because I've heard several times now some rumours that the reason quote-boosts haven't been implemented is because it's likely to be used for harassment and other bad stuff - similar to the motivation of only being able to use the search for hashtags, usernames and toot URLs.

[thiagomgd]

I love and hate the quote option on the birdsite. Why:

Love: I can share AND comment at the same time. Of course, boosting and then replying would have kind of the same result, but anyway...

Hate: people use that to spread the flame wars. Instead of replying the poster, they share / comment, just to make their followers be able to harass the original poster.

So I have a few considerations: Instances should be able to block it Users should be able to block it (let's say I don't want anyone quoting me) And of course, each instance would add some rules about that.

And at last, of course, we should see the embed/quoted toot, as we do on that other site.

[fsnk]

I too would like this feature. I feel like it adds value to the conversation to know why someone in my timeline is boosting something. If they agree or disagree or what their thoughts are or it's their friend's artwork or whatever. I also think that embedding the boosted toot makes for a more streamlined experience.

Something I dislike about how this is implemented in other platforms is that the comment becomes the primary status for replies, which can create confusion in threading. Especially if people are quote boosting replies to quote boosted replies to quote boosted replies.

Regarding the harassment issue, I've definitely seen this used on other sites to start dogpiles, but I'm not sure that the bad use of the feature outweighs the value it adds in giving context and enabling conversations. I've seen Mastodon users screenshot other users' posts to criticize and denigrate already; all it needs is a link to the original status and that behavior is essentially duplicated. And the original user never knows it's happening, unlike a quote boost where they should get a notification.

Having an automated feature would make harassment easier by cutting out the screenshot/image add/link paste actions, but not having the feature doesn't stop it. (And that technique is still used on other social media sites that do have the ability to quote boost when harassers want to obscure where the dogpile is coming from.)

So I guess the thing is, how to implement this feature in a way that gives the original poster some control over the boosting? Maybe give users the ability to remove their status from the quote boost, leaving a comment that was intended to provoke harassment without context? (Much like deleting a quoted tweet does on Twitter.)

I don't know. I would definitely like some kind of feature that allows me to attach a comment to a boost though.

[nolanlawson]

I agree with @thiagomgd that this feature is a mixed bag. In fact, overall I'd rather not have it, or have it turned off by default.

Reason being: this feature is often misused for dog-piling and abuse. When it was first introduced on Twitter, I saw it quickly appropriated for the purpose of directing one's followers against another user. Frequently this spirals out of control, with endless quote-tweeting (such that you have to click multiple times to even follow the kaleidoscoping conversation), and tweets are often taken out of context (especially if it makes for a better punchline at the other person's expense).

Quote-tweeting can be used for good, but in my experience it's more often used for nastiness. I call this the "Hey everybody, get a load of THIS jerk!" phenomenon.

Of course you can already do this with a screenshot, but at least with screenshots you're not notifying the other person that you're mocking/disparaging them (which can escalate the situation). Plus quote-tweeting makes this kind of harassment easier to do, and affordances matter.

I don't always agree with Paul Graham, but his assessment of this feature rings true with my experiences.

[fenarinarsa]

IMO abuse and dogpiling can be done without this feature. As said above, a simple screenshot is enough to start harrassment, and anyway people who want to abuse the system will always find a way (and they love to subtweet/subtoot to obfuscate the origin of the harrassment). Quote+boost on the other way could be useful to trace down all boosts origin for instance moderators, and removing the original toot should leave the boosts without reference to the original post.

Furthermore, on Twitter I often quote political or news posts to answer or comment publicly, often joking or being ironic. Sometimes I also boost by adding "this art is great", and so on. I miss this deeply on Mastodon, where the only choice I have is "boosting or not boosting", meaning "I agree" or "I don't agree" without any possibility of having more subtle nuance in my boosts.

[h-2]

Wow, I was really surprised (in the negative sense) that this doesn't work. IMHO it's a central feature of twitter (being able to comment on other tweets) and not having this in Mastodon is a real limitation. Also being able to quote tweets from twitter would make migrating from twitter step-by-step a lot easier.

[PubliqPhirm]

As a middle ground between fully implementing Twitter-style quote toots and not having inline previews at all, we could not have a button that will make a quote toot but do expand links to fediverse posts inline so you could still link to and comment about a post in an inline fashion.

RE: harassment/dogpiling—do we have data beyond personal anecdotes as to whether users are less likely to engage in bad behavior when the (intentional or accidental) target of ire is linked with no preview, when it's an unverifiable screenshot (easily faked; in my experience, no one on social media has actually let the existence of dev tools fun stop them from making conclusions based on screenshots of conversation), when it's a simple inline preview, and when it's a full Twitter-style quote toot? My gut feeling is that Twitter and screenshots make it the worst and previews cause slightly more problems than naked links, but the Twitter and screenshot cause so much more problems that the difference between a simple embedded preview and a naked link could be negligible. This also touches on a related discussion as to whether stopping talking behind a user's back is more important or stopping hostile @ interactions is more important. Given the decision to avoid full-text search, the Masto decision is currently on the side of letting people talk negatively about one another behind their backs so long as that stops users from being directly nasty in mentions.

[LoVicente]

my unsolicited 2c: I'm one of the artists/comic people that recently migrated to mastodon from twitter alongside a bunch of my peers. Even with most of the same people here, we all agree the atmosphere feels a lot different: way more personal, and so far it feels less like constantly performing in front of an audience.

We think a big part of it is that you don't see the numbers everywhere (followers/likes/RTs/etc), which definitely helps in making the place feel like less of a competition, and in return makes the place more welcoming to just being authentic. And we love it!

When considering the effects of a lack of quote+boost, we were reminded of the impact it had on Twitter when it was implemented. In hindsight, it changed the way we engaged with content drastically, even if we didn't notice at the time.

In the words of jones@mastodon.social: "quote-tweeting is what ruined us all there. i think it encouraged us to be more performative than ever... to make quippy clapbacks at a faceless entity and humiliate them for those sweet likes and RTs i guess"

In any case, I understand the feature has its legitimate uses and it can certainly be useful, but it's worth considering its effects on the behavior of the userbase itself. Certainly, the increased engagement was useful for Twitter the company, even if the quality of engagement decreased greatly.

[fenarinarsa]

I just read LoMakesComics comment and what's incredible is that I use quote+RT on twitter for exactly the opposite: sharing an artist's work I like. With no quote it's harder to share a picture with no context whatsoever (espescially when you don't usually share pics). The only other way to add a comment when sharing would be to copy/paste the artwork, and I don't want to do that. In that case I prefer not to share.

[Swipe650]

Is abuse that big of an issue on mastodon? I thought that nonsense only took place on the bird site.

[moosfromamsterdam]

Simple solution: show ‘my reply’ under a boosted post on my timeline and the other timelines

No need to change functionality of boosting. Just write a reply to the post you want to boost to let everyone see your ‘motivation’ for boosting it.

[deutrino]

The utility of this is huge and I frequently wish it were possible. It's almost a daily thing that I wish I could boost something cool with a little comment of my own.

How about, instead of (or in addition to) a simple on-off switch, we let the user restrict quoting to followers only? I believe either or both of these would be good to toggle in settings, e.g.

[] don't allow anyone to quote me [x] only allow followers to quote me

[PubliqPhirm]

Another important use case for some quote boost feature: adding CWs to posts you boost. Currently, if you want to boost a post that needs a CW that’s from an instance that uses software that doesn’t support CWs or has more looser CW rules or culture, you need to paste in a link to the original post and put it behind the CW. There are two main issues with this:

1. This requires copy & pasting the URL of the post you want to boost, which may not have an immediately obvious mechanism.  Third-party apps can probably automate this for you somewhat, if they so desired.
2. The post renders as just some other link on the receiving end and opens in a new tab, like it’s some generic off-site link, so you can’t boost it yourself or favorite or reply to it without knowing that you fist much copy the URL and paste it into your instance’s searchbox (even if those features are disabled for “not being like Twitter” reasons, the new tab for a fediverse post is a rather jarring user experience).  It should be relatively easy to add inline client-side rendering of links to posts from known Mastodon instances (unless they have modified their instance’s code to have a different URL scheme than vanilla Mastodon).  Clicking an inline preview should open the linked post in the third column, like when clicking a specific post on your home TL.

I’m kind of surprised some third-party mobile apps (Amaroq, Tootle, Tootdon, etc…) or alternate UI views (Glitch or Pleroma's Masto frontend) have not implemented this feature already, especially on the mobile end, where (at least personally) new tabs are more annoying to deal with than on the desktop view.

On Jan 19, 2018, 14:48 -0500, Deutrino notifications@github.com, wrote:

The utility of this is huge and I frequently wish it were possible. It's almost a daily thing that I wish I could boost something cool with a little comment of my own. How about, instead of (or in addition to) a simple on-off switch, we let the user restrict quoting to followers only? I believe either or both of these would be good to toggle in settings, e.g. [] don't allow anyone to quote me [x] only allow followers to quote me — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or mute the thread.

[Cassolotl]

@PubliqPhirm You might be interested in:

Clicking a URL of a toot should open the toot in the search area #2136

[waweic]

Now that mastodon is primarily based on ActivityPub, how would it be possible to implement such a feature without losing compatibility to OStatus?

[PubliqPhirm]

@waweic Are you thinking of having some new quote activity or just as client-side oembed previews?

[waweic]

I actually just thought about doing/interpreting the audience targeting differently or maybe interpreting your boosts of a reply of yours as a public comment. I think it could also be possible to add a summary to the Announce Activity to implement Content Warnings. But I don't really know OStatus, so I don't know whether features like that would be possible there. --EDIT-- I wrote something about my interpretation of audience targetion in #8067. This may also be interesting to read

[BenLubar]

Mastodon almost supports this in its UI already:

https://mastodon.social/@BenLubar/100923375075173586

Unfortunately, this does a few things wrong:

1. It doesn't count as a reply or notify the quoted user.
2. You can't see the embedded toot in any timeline view.
3. There's no UI for doing this, so users need to know they can just copy and paste a URL.

Since mastodon.social already knows that the botsin.space link refers to a toot (that is, it showed up on the federated timeline at some point), it should be possible to fix points 1 and 2 without any third party instance changes.

For 3, I'd suggest adding an option to make a reply in the boost confirmation screen, similar to what Twitter does for retweets.

/cc https://mastodon.social/@thebestpatrick/100920465209108240

[crockwave]

I have a special use case, which is to monitor the Atom feed of a user account that is used exclusively for curating Mastodon feed content to a remote content aggregation site. That aggregated content would be available as an RSS/Atom feed. To make the Mastodon portion of that content richer, we would need a way to parse a useful Title value out of the Atom feed. If the curating account boosted only toots that should be aggregated, and had the ability to edit a comment during the boosting process, the comment value would be parsed out of the Atom feed and used as a Title value in the aggregated RSS feed. Currently, a boosted toot has a common title value of curating_username shared a status by originating_username. If we had the ability to add metadata during a boost, such as a comment, then the resulting aggregated RSS feed title could look like Saul makes a good point about such-and-so

[vibhi19]

I agree with @thiagomgd that this feature is a mixed bag. In fact, overall I'd rather not have it, or have it turned off by default.

Reason being: this feature is often misused for dog-piling and abuse. When it was first introduced on Twitter, I saw it quickly appropriated for the purpose of directing one's followers against another user. Frequently this spirals out of control, with endless quote-tweeting (such that you have to click multiple times to even follow the kaleidoscoping conversation), and tweets are often taken out of context (especially if it makes for a better punchline at the other person's expense).

Quote-tweeting can be used for good, but in my experience it's more often used for nastiness. I call this the "Hey everybody, get a load of THIS jerk!" phenomenon.

Of course you can already do this with a screenshot, but at least with screenshots you're not notifying the other person that you're mocking/disparaging them (which can escalate the situation). Plus quote-tweeting makes this kind of harassment easier to do, and affordances matter.

I don't always agree with Paul Graham, but his assessment of this feature rings true with my experiences.

You can notify him by adding his/her handle and i dont understand why people have so overprotective nature here. if some one abusing you use block button and you doen. If someone gonna abuse someone he gonna do it anyway it either this way or that why people here started making assumption what it gonna use it for.

[Gargron]

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/cage-the-mastodon/

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.

[vibhi19]

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/cage-the-mastodon/

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.

Rename mastodon to "what gargron wants"

[trwnh]

reiterating: considering that the function of a quote is fundamentally to create a nested link, it's just encouraging bad behavior. whether the link is expanded or not is irrelevant to that fundamental. have you ever tried to click through a chain of 100+ nested quotes to find the original? when twitter first released the quote feature, that's one of the first things that people did. in fact, i'd wager that the average quote tweet depth is probably more than 1, given that several people fall into the antipattern of just quoting each other back and forth -- what they are doing is in effect a "public reply", and therefore they should handle it that way using the existing functionality of replying to a post then boosting their own reply. the two actions are equivalent, except replies are flat instead of nested. by that framework of judgement, the quote pattern is objectively worse than the reply pattern.

[z3dx95g7]

(edited for clarity) replying and quote-tooting are intentionally not equivalent actions, even apart from embedding, because replies never reach public timelines, nor do boosts. that is an aspect that has contributed to, in some cases, the somewhat frustrating "LB" / "Last Boost" prefix pattern, for which context can be nearly impossible to find in the future without hunting through the person's timeline. sometimes that's exactly how people want it, but other times they might use "LB" so that public timelines see their response. it's not the best behavior and maybe not extremely common, but regardless of motivation, public "LB" toots do happen.

so, you still have to include a toot link if you want other people to be able to access the toot you're responding to on public timelines. there is no other paradigm available, that i can think of. (correct me if i am wrong.) screenshotting is still a possibility, but thankfully the fediverse generally discourages that behavior. the main issue with linking to a toot is that, currently, mastodon doesn't handle fediverse links as most users would want or expect, taking them out of the (web) app and onto a page where they most-likely can't interact, but that's another issue and in this case maybe somewhat of a feature, since it's so unintuitive and confusing to inexperienced users that it could reduce dogpiling

[protospork]

have you ever tried to click through a chain of 100+ nested quotes to find the original?

I have, and it's considerably easier than trawling an active poster's timeline (probably on an unfamiliar instance's public UI, because the mastodon frontend randomly opens a new tab).

sireebob just said the same thing, but I wanted to highlight this part in particular. We had quote tweets on twitter, and we liked them because it was a simple feature that made it considerably easier to foster discussions . We know it's easier, because we've had it before. So any arguments saying "actually, this just makes everything more complicated" have already been proven false.

[trwnh]

We had quote tweets on twitter, and we liked them because it was a simple feature that made it considerably easier to foster discussions . We know it's easier, because we've had it before. So any arguments saying "actually, this just makes everything more complicated" have already been proven false.

What you refer to as "fostering discussion" I refer to as "artificial inflation", with stuff that should've naturally decayed with time instead being repeated several times into the same timeline. Native boosts can be deduplicated. Quote boosts are by definition unique posts and therefore cannot be deduplicated. The problem is exactly that it's too easy, and therefore too easy for users to fall victim to antipatterns, as we've seen on Twitter -- dunking, dogpiling, performativeness, etc. I'm not denying you may have seen different behavior on a smaller scale, but all evidence is anecdotal. I would still wager the vast majority of quote tweets should instead be replies, or perhaps not even posted at all.

Also, I fail to see why anyone would "crawl through an active poster's timeline" when they could simply click once to open the entire thread. This is what I meant by flat threads vs nested links. Navigating deeply-nested quotes is an objectively more inconvenient data representation. Why expand one reply when you can expand the entire thread? It strips context.

[protospork]

Also, I fail to see why anyone would "crawl through an active poster's timeline" when they could simply click once to open the entire thread.

"LB" posts aren't attached to a thread.
I rarely see anyone do the "reply, then boost the reply" thing you suggested earlier. Or maybe I do see it, and I gloss over it because it appears in my timeline completely devoid of context. Hard to say.

Why expand one reply when you can expand the entire thread? It strips context.

Context is the problem here. If I could just "expand the entire thread" from an LB post, that'd be something.

[trwnh]

LB posts can be attached to the thread. You have the option of creating a new unattached post, or replying directly in the thread, or composing a reply and removing the mention if you don't want to notify the other person of your LB comment.

Examples of LB that is in reply to a post and dropping the mention:

• https://mastodon.social/@trwnh/101405868252209917
• https://mastodon.social/@Altruest/101321024313556969

Examples of LB in reply to a different thread and therefore unlinked to the referenced post:

• https://mastodon.social/@trwnh/101736603757222190
• https://hex.bz/@somarasu/100523234945541695

Example of LB standalone (perhaps intentionally):

• https://slime.global/users/tom/updates/48990

[fenarinarsa]

In addition when you click on a reply on Mastodon you often don't have the entire thread unless your instance follows all participants (last time I checked at least). IMO LB are really annoying since you need to at least click on it to see what's it about.

The "many nested links" think may happen, but I've been on Twitter for years and it's really, really rare. It's more often done as a joke.

The issue is more that Quote+Boost is really convenient to publicly boost an account audience. In the good way ("Look, this artist is really good ! + boost) or of course in an abusive way. It's also very useful when boosting news outlets, because you may not be exactly agree with them. A simple boost really means that you agree 100% with its contents, which is not always the case (far from it).

Now let's see the technical aspects of a quote+boost: from what I see, it's just a link to a toot that appears embedded in your own toot (like a YT video). Currently when you do put a link to a boost, there is no preview, and when you click on it it opens a new window that gives you the complete user's profile.

In my opinion, it just looks like the interface is crippled, not that a feature is missing by choice.

[protospork]

Now let's see the technical aspects of a quote+boost: from what I see, it's just a link to a toot that appears embedded in your own toot (like a YT video).

Technically there's some more to it, since it should probably notify the original poster (just like a normal boost). Otherwise, yeah, it's just an abusable way to subtoot people.

@trwnh Re: the apparent ability to add LB posts to threads:
I had no idea this existed. You just start a reply and delete all the names from it? It makes sense that it'd work, now that I think about it (I've probably done it accidentally, even), but it seems more like an exploit than a planned feature- so is it going to keep working that way in the future?
Are there any plans to make that option obvious somehow, so maybe people will use it more consistently?

[andrejstefanovski]

I can't believe there is no Boost + Comment.

Suggested in 2016? Three years later it's being held back by one guy 😯

Way to hold back the viability of your platform.

[PubliqPhirm]

Do links to fedi posts get inline link previews now and therefore this issue is superfluous?

[tmladek]

I do see the dunking potential of Quote-Retweets / Quote-Boosts, but I really don't think that the pattern itself is somehow inherently abuse-prone. In my twitter circles, most people use it in productive ways, kind of like annotations - new information attached to existing content, the context of which is preserved (!).

I think this presents a separate and worthwhile use-case, so I strongly disagree with this statement:

I would still wager the vast majority of quote tweets should instead be replies, or perhaps not even posted at all.

Replies create structure "below" the post, whereas quote-tweets build "on top of" the post. In fact, why I looked this issue up in the first place is that I saw a toot I liked, and want to boost it as I think it already stands well on its own, but I also have a perspective to add which doesn't make sense to post as a separate toot, but is not strictly a reply either.

When you use the reply function, your message is broadcast only to people who happen to follow you both.

Which is precisely what I don't want! Most of people who follow me don't follow the people I do, so they would miss out on the conversation. I see how this matches the pattern of overwhelming smaller accounts with one's follower count, but I would urge to reconsider - if the primary contention is that it enables abuse, then I don't see how that's anyhow prevented, given that one can already link and dunk on specific posts, so I think this disallowing this feature prevents more of the beneficial and benign uses than abusive ones.

Not to mention, the possibility of self-referencing old posts in chains of past conversations and threads, allowing it to carry a bit more substance and not disappear into the ether...

[Rexogamer]

As per above, I fail to see how not supporting quote toots prevents abuse/pile-ons when you could just... link to the toot you're "quoting" with a screenshot? In my view, this harms the UX for little to no benefit - I would strongly suggest reconsidering this decision.

[asahilina]

I agree! In particular, I think that if you are "dunking" on someone, your followers are much more likely to follow a bare link anyway (anger drives engagement...) so it doesn't matter, while positive comments would benefit much more from having an inline view of the post that was quoted.

[one-github]

I really would like this feature since commenting (maybe disagreeing) when boosting while preserving context at the same time is very useful and works great in practice. Why is this such a hard thing to agree upon?

[slogslog]

Quite happy that this feature won't be implemented.