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.

@kichae@lemmy.ca 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.

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.

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.