Note that I said "quoted posts", not "quote posts", don't @ me!

After the last WG meeting @thisismissem@hachyderm.io @trwnh@mastodon.social 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.

This also reminds me of a discussion I had way back when I first joined fedi, with @leroy@indiehackers.social. When mocking up a forum-like frontend for ActivityPub data*, he actually rendered the content of the inReplyTo as a blockquote before the reply, which is actually quite an interesting use-case for inReplyTo!

* Also, is there anything more indie hacker than that? lol

@julian @leroy I think <blockquote> is fine, so long as it's attributes link to the post it's quoting from? That way in Tags you could have a Quote Tag or something that's just a Link to the quoted post.

Obviously you'd probably want to align with @renchap and the Mastodon team on the difference between Quote Posts and Quotes within Posts — does it make sense on a forum to prohibit quoting of you?

@thisismissem @julian @leroy Yes, we are starting again exploring how to represent quoted content (in a generic way) in ActivityPub, to then use this for our specific usage (quote posts).
Side note for Julian: I sent you a DM a while ago and never got a response, can you contact me either in DM, email or Discord?

Hi @renchap@oisaur.com — yes, once again NodeBB's lack of DM support causes me to miss a message! I'm literally working on it right now, so hopefully end of week.

I'll message you from @nodebb@fosstodon.org directly.

@thisismissem@hachyderm.io said in Quoted posts:

does it make sense on a forum to prohibit quoting of you?

I will say that back in the day nobody ever thought about this particular use case. Also me earlier:

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.

Even writing that now I was struck by how problematic that can be. It just simply wasn't something you thought about back then, but the right to be forgotten needs to be addressed too.

I'm not weighing in on that issue specifically, but just remarking on how our approaches to public discussions have changed over the years.

cc @renchap@oisaur.com

@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

@renchap @julian @leroy

I feel like a first step we may be able to do is support <blockquote> and encourage clients to support that markup (currently @ivory doesn't support that html tag in content)

@thisismissem@hachyderm.io Yes, I've noticed that Megalodon also doesn't support blockquotes, but the web client definitely does (I just checked hachyderm), which is a great start.

@julian so perhaps more an advocacy thing than a feature change?

Little heads-up: So far, Hubzilla renders everything the way I guess it's intended. Nothing out of the ordinary.

@julian @trwnh @thisismissem

>How that is represented via ActivityPub is probably detailed in some FEP

FEP-e232? I think you can add content or summary property to FEP-e232 link to represent HTML content of a quote

@thisismissem @julian @leroy @renchap I take the same view as @leroy as well -- you can render replies as a rich preview above every post that happens to be a reply. Discord does this, for example. In fact, if Mastodon did this, then they would only need a way to tell when to insert such "quote replies" into timelines and when not to. It could be as simple as a boolean toot:quoteReply = true. With management of the `replies` collection via FEP-7458 (and some proof/stamp mechanism like FEP-0391).

@silverpill @thisismissem @julian I think you could define a Quote type that is a subclass of Link and use microsyntax to find-and-replace the blockquote with a rich entity with `content` or maybe even `preview`. But this generally makes sense only when you want that rich entity, and not just a "simple" blockquote.

Discourse for example uses [quote] tags kinda like bbcode, and they add metadata something like [quote author:someone,thread:2319,post:69] where the metadata is used in the preview.

@trwnh@mastodon.social part of the reason we don't do this special syntax is because we (probably) made the conscious decision to keep the composer as simple as possible so that end users wouldn't have to relearn a bespoke syntax.

... but I'm not really sure anymore. My rationale could just be post facto lol

@julian yeah, if you have a rich composer it's less bad. i don't think i've ever manually authored a quote tag in Discourse, for example. every single time i quote someone it's via the floating button that appears when you select something, or via the dropdown menu option

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 [quote] tags too.

It's all blockquotes.

Note: This posts uses <code> blocks. This may not render properly on all platforms.