Submit feedback and pull requests to improve the feature to make it much less controversial.
Good. I get why they were originally resistant to it, but fringe, outlier situations can be dealt with when you have actual mods maintaining things. The reason quote-retweeting was used so heavily for bullying on Twitter was because there were no repercussions for it, and Twitter never enforced their bullying rules for the practice. Mastodon instances have their own mods enforcing their own rules, to a much better degree than Twitter ever has. While the potential for bullying still exists, it’s far easier to mitigate on Mastodon.
I’m so confused. How would quoting someone’s words bully them? Maybe I’m not getting something. You’re talking like I say something on mastodon, you quote what I said, with me attributed to the quote, and that bullys me? Or am I missing something? I feel like I’m missing something.
(This is an example.)
Get a load of this idiot! They can’t imagine how quoting someone can be bullying!
Omg howd you do that without a quote feature remove images from mastodon
Haha, what a bozo! Now we’re going to relentlessly shit-talk them in this sub-thread that OP has no ability to moderate nor stem the flow of vitriol from.
(Further continuing the example.)
Aren’t Mastodon instances maintained by volunteers in their spare time? I can’t imagine how they manage to continue moderating it once there are ten thousand or millions of users on it. At least the moderators on Twitter were paid. It was their job. I think people massively underestimate how much work this is.
Most instances will stop allowing new accounts to be created when it reaches a certain size that gets difficult to manage (hardware and moderating-wise). They self-regulate that way, and instances that get out of control will just be defederated by the others.
That’s true, but I don’t think we’ll see that sort of rapid growth on Mastodon. At least not for a while. For now, Bluesky is sucking up most of the users seeking Twitter alternatives. I imagine that the growth will be slow enough that it’ll be easy enough for mod teams to scale up to.
It’s a good feature that’s only controversial because it was used on a shitty platform
It was part of what made the platform shitty…
What’s wrong with quote posts?
quote dunking I guess?
If I infer from context clues, quote dunking is commenting disparagingly to frame the quoted tweet? I left Twitter in like 2011.
I’ve never heard the phrase but I’m 10000% positive that’s what it means.
at first i was again it, but there’s no action on mastodn, it’s a very slow closed system, and quote toots might open it up
Good feature, I don’t see any problems.
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Quotes are controversial because Twitter people used it to foster toxicity. However, on Mastodon, we have actually active mods. Ideally, you should be self-hosting your own instance anyways and be your own mod.
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Also, it seems very well implemented, much better than on Twitter: Mastodon says it will allow users to control whether their posts can be quoted. Also, users will be notified if someone quotes them, and they’ll be able to withdraw their post from the quoted context at any time.
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Most importantly, Mastodon has an active developer who responds to feedback, and PULL REQUESTS, ISSUE TRACKERS, AND GITHUB DISCUSSIONS exist!
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If you still completely disagree with this decision, fork the project, create a patch, and start your own server with the patched Mastodon!
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It seems the solution is to allow a user to choose whether to be quote-posted, perhaps down to a post-level.
That has implementation hurdles, I’m sure, but I think we should try to build it right this time.
I think you’d need a little more than that to make sure the restriction isn’t used defensively by harassers (one of the reasons people ask for this is to show others bad behavior in their replies). But it does feel like a solvable problem.
And Mastodon having more active moderation (since you can proactively look for an instance that meets your moderation expectations) also means the stuff that can’t be handled mechanically can be managed.
That’s literally what they’re doing:
For starters, Mastodon says it will allow users to control whether their posts can be quoted at all. This would protect people from being the recipient of unwanted attention or hateful replies to some extent. (Though, arguably, people could still screenshot someone’s post to circulate it more broadly if they intended to troll the user.)
In addition, users will be notified if someone quotes them, and they’ll be able to withdraw their post from the quoted context at any time. This latter option could help in the case that someone’s quote post goes viral, and the original poster starts to receive too much attention or even abuse, forcing them to reconsider whether they want their post to be quotable at all.
Oh, well then that’s good. Yay Mastodon!
Much needed feature
I’m glad they’re adding it; I also hope that they take Bsky’s ability to detach yourself from the quoted post too.
They will have that it’s in the article
based
Bluesky has a feature where you can stop someone from quoting your post if you don’t like what they are saying.
RIP mastodon
Then we can finally get people to write
Don’t subtoot me bro
Is that the controversial part?