@trwnh I don't think there's any one answer to this

One of the most common use cases is commentary or response, a "loud reply" as @erincandescent put it. I think most of the hostile uses of quote posting fall into this category (which is not to say it's always or even usually hostile)

But also sometimes it's just to add emphasis, explanation, or even just personalization to a "boost." i.e., to share something with an explanation of why you're sharing

@tech_himbo this seems to still be about functionality not semantics, although it does get at the intended purpose. but semantically you are talking about audience and context, and the same functionality could be modeled by setting a flag to show reply context, or by changing a context, or even being particular about who you include in `to` vs who you include in `cc`.

the question is, is this enough? or does the act also involve a component of “special relationship” between quote and quoted?

@joelving sure, but everything is a reference. replies are just a special reference that indicate you are responding to something. the attribution is just a special reference indicating authorship.

the thing i’m interested in finding is: how can we describe the “quote” relationship, if such a thing even really exists?

@trwnh maybe we have different ideas of semantics. for me, specifying an addressee 100% changes the meaning of an utterance. if i yell “fire” at a rifleman, it means something different than yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. the meaning isn’t just the replied/quoted post plus my post; it also includes the relation my audience has to my post. more broadly: meaning is a function of how an audience relates to an utterance, so signaling the audience and intended relationship changes the meaning

@trwnh a further way of looking at this: a quote is a way of replying and expanding audience; of bringing new people into the conversation

@trwnh this also distinguishes things majorly from forum style inline quoting which is mostly about referring to pieces of a previous message

@trwnh Maybe I'm not getting what you're trying to achieve. My point was that it will probably be impossible to enumerate every kind of relationship between two posts. We have "replies", "for example", "see also", "source", "rebuttal", "review", and the list goes on.
Am I missing what you're after?

@foolishowl interesting. for

> like a review of another microblog post or thread

is there any meaning attached to the relationship, or is the meaning in the act?

> a deliberate change of context, making it a special case of a reply

these are semantically `context` and `inReplyTo`. how does a quote differ from replying to something but changing the context?

@trwnh been pondering this. I think the cleanest relationship I've been able to come up with is that a quote post recontextualizes the original post. it removes it from its original context and places it in a new context.

@tom @erincandescent so is it always a response, or only sometimes? is emphasis/explanation a type of response?

@erincandescent @trwnh Yeah that and here one way I like using quotes is to somewhat fork the thread, like to avoid derailing the existing discussion.

@trwnh when I think about it, ActivityStreams 1 had a comment objectType. This is distinct from note, which top level posts typically were.

In AS1 you might have expressed "quote semantics" with a non-comment reply

@trwnh As I understand it, the main concerns are also the main reasons it would be useful: the ability to easily find the original poster, also the ability to reframe the post into a context more relevant to your stream.

@tech_himbo well sure, but that’s “meaning” in a functional sense as tou point out. like intention.

“semantics” here is descriptive. it asks “what is the nature of the relationship between the current thing and the linked thing”. if viewing a “quote post” in isolation, can we represent it through a combination of existing properties, or does it deserve its own new property?

we have `context`, inReplyTo`, `to` or `cc` or `audience`, even `tag` or `attachment`, and so on. can we just use these?

@trwnh the relationship between a quoted post and the one that quotes it is that of a dunk and a dunkee. a strawman and the argument that shreds it. a screencap and the accompanying roast text.
its purpose is to elevate the quoter literally above the quoted and profit off the difference.

I fuckin' hate quote shit

@joelving i’m trying to do protocol stuff, even knowledge modeling.

we have context, audience, to, cc, inReplyTo, tag, attachment — do we need quote/quoteOf?

To me, in Smithereen, it's a link preview that's getting some special treatment and that you create with a dedicated UI. The difference between quotes and link previews is that I don't do link previews yet. The semantic relationship is the same as when I link something in my own post. To quote something means to include it as part of your own post, possibly adding your own comment, to have a conversation about it with your followers.

@trwnh @darius I think the difference between a quote post and a simple link preview is that I expect the quote post to be more “live“. I think from a semantic perspective that means that whatever software is doing the reading understand that it is a post. I think (but I am not certain) that was missing right now, semantically, is about the post part, not the quoting per se.

@trwnh @darius In practical terms, I think the most important implication of that is that when I tap on it, my client should open it as a post, not a webpage. Also, embedded media should be live.

There are open UI questions about whether other things about the quoted post should be inherited by the parent, things like content warnings (probably) and @ mentions (probably not), but those all depend on semantically understanding that the thing is a post to start with.

@trwnh No, not always.

For instance, let's say a podcast makes a post about their new episode. I loved the episode so I want to share it to my followers.

I could just boost if, but instead I "quote post", adding: "whoa, great new episode of this podcast. I've you've ever been curious to check the show out this would be a good one to start with."

I would not consider that a "response" because it's not addressing the original poster