I'm still on the fence about mastodon's choice not to notify people when they get quote posted.

In the past I wanted it this way. Because I believe getting notified created bad incentives.

"Is this person talking to me or about me?"

"Is this a dunk? I don't know, but I better assume it is."

Anyway, right now I'm thinking about the tradeoff. I think I'm missing a lot of discourse because I don't get notified of people commenting on my posts.

@polotek i'm curious, do you think that linking to a web resource should automatically notify the author of that resource, or should it be the choice of the person linking to that resource? because i see two aspects here:

1) "quotes" aren't a real thing, they're just links that might have a fancy preview
2) you can choose to mention/address (or not!) the person you are quoting, in the same way that you can reply to someone without notifying them

@trwnh @polotek Is it actually possible to not mention the account you're replying to on Mastodon? On Pleroma, such user is always mentioned and this seems to be expected behavior.

I also use a MRF that tags me in every post that's a reply/quote of my post coming from other software

@trwnh for the record, I believe that the user experience is way more "real" than protocol decisions. Quote posts are a thing because people want them to be a thing. How well they are actually supported by the protocol is incidental.

That said, the fediverse is unique in the sense that different people can opt into or out of different experiences based on the same data. I'm just musing out loud about some of those tradeoffs.

@polotek oh i meant less that they don’t exist at a protocol level and more that they don’t exist at a semantic or ontological level. which is to say: when people talk about “quote posts”, they are drawing from their experience with twitter’s implementation of converting trailing links to tweets into embedded previews. twitter then went on to auto-notify anyone who got linked, as well as add a button to auto-inject a link at the end of your tweet after you send it.

@polotek so if we want to make “quote posts” real, we need to unpack and define each of the components that make up a “quote post” in theory.

this is where the “auto-notify someone they’ve been linked to” thing comes up. i think this is something that should be the choice of the person doing the quoting. in current terms, clients that support client-side“quote posts” might inject a mention of the person alongside the link to their post.

@polotek It would be more than a little weird if Mastodon started to parse every single received post for a link, then if it’s a link to some local status, generate a notification for that user. I think such behavior would get me to not only stop using Mastodon entirely, but also completely block any and all Mastodon servers from following me as long as they implemented this behavior.