Mastodon Engineering
Bringing this highly requested feature to #Mastodon and the fediverse is not as trivial as some might think, but quote posts are coming. Here is our latest write-up about our progress:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/02/bringing-quote-posts-to-mastodon/
Arun Shah™
@MastodonEngineering finally
Kristoffer Patrick Cornils
@MastodonEngineering Please don't do this. Design choices that allow users to quite literally put their opinion above someone else's statements are absolutely poisoneous for any attempts to create an egalitarian communcation.
JP
@MastodonEngineering it's encouraging to see this particular form of consideration, thank you:
Mr. Funk E. Dude
@MastodonEngineering long story short: Don't hold your breath.
WTL
@MastodonEngineering This sounds like a very reasonable way to handle quote-posting.
Ride Theory
@MastodonEngineering Oh no.
Kailas Idavanmuzhi
@MastodonEngineering will there be an option to turn off quote posts from my feed ?
nicolas ⁂
@MastodonEngineering Good to see this feature getting thoughtful consideration!
One more element could be the ability to like/boost/save the original post easily, and not only the quote post. That can avoid another pitfall of quote posts: the quote getting more attention than the original.
BeAware
@wjmaggos @MastodonEngineering I'm worried that this will pretty much kill the ability to be able to link to problematic/bad behavior posts as evidence for moderation.
If people can just stop you from linking to their bad behavior post, crowdsourced moderation will have to rely on "trust me bro" and screenshots.😬
william.maggos
I'd rather we have something like the ability to share a post but with a pointer to a reply. So it looks like a QP but only to your followers. To everyone else, it is a reply. And this means it stays attached but subservient to the OP.
I'd also like to see all replies rankable ala reddit. This would give us something like Community Notes, where the top responses are show up right under the OP. And the worst stuff for popular posts would be easily ignored.
BeAware
@wjmaggos @MastodonEngineering I hope so.
Threads ties QPs to links and if a person limits QPs, you're not linking to that post.
That's why I'm worried.
william.maggos
I assume you'd still be able to link to a post, it just wouldn't show up like a QP. You'd still be able to do what you do now when QPs don't exist on mastodon.
Apan
@MastodonEngineering Rewoking quotes and disabled quotes will just make people screenshot the quotes instead just as the do on twitterposts and then post them on mastodon. It's just an hassle.
Guerric Haché
@MastodonEngineering
I'm deeply skeptical about the long-term social benefits of this feature, but I appreciate that you're building in user-level controls to try to mitigate harm. I have a few questions:
1) Will users be able to opt one specific post out of *all* quotes? Or will they need to go individually retract the post from each place it has been quoted, potentially hundreds in the case of a large harassment effort?
Jazzonbike
@MastodonEngineering Thank You for implementing this long-awaited feature!
chad006
@MastodonEngineering thank you for the hard work
sheislaurence
@MastodonEngineering OMG! I can remember a time not so long ago, when the majority was saying it was "anti-#fedi" to even think about the feature, in the name of some unknown purity. That's great news. No, I don't believe this is going to lead to #enshittification , quite the opposite.
Ujjwal
@MastodonEngineering Nice
Simon
@MastodonEngineering yay finally! 😁
bazkie, lanparty callgirl
@MastodonEngineering "You will be able to withdraw your post from the quoted context at any time." I appreciate that! 💚
Garfella
@MastodonEngineering
👏👏👏👏🙏
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
🗣 FUCK YEAH & THANK YOU 🥳 🥳 🥳
rexi
woohoo: perfection, if it works.
"In order to mitigate these issues, we plan to include several features in our implementation:
‣ You will be able to choose whether your posts can be quoted at all.
‣ You will be notified when someone quotes you.
‣ You will be able to withdraw your post from the quoted context at any time."
🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 🐧 🥦
@MastodonEngineering Up to date article, brief, clear, and got to the point.
It is also a good sign that the decision makers have the ability to change their mind. Looking forward to it.
Mike Griese
@MastodonEngineering [everybody liked that]
myrmepropagandist
One other use case:
I sometimes want to share political news, but it's not tagged with "us pol" and I promised those who follow me I'd use that tag unless it was really important. Or there is a funny image with no alt text.
The ability to add context means more things will get shared.
myrmepropagandist
It's about time. This will make many of my posts calling attention to artwork and projects by others much more effective. I've been very frustrated with how difficult it is to do this ever since I joined.
Simply boosting and commenting then boosting the comment isn't the same.
Rich Felker
@futurebird @MastodonEngineering Yes, adding cw or burying an offensive image in link preview is a huge feature.
Rich Felker
@futurebird @MastodonEngineering I'm so psyched for what the communities on Mastodon come up with using quoting.
myrmepropagandist
Every person on here is a little part of the algorithm and we all do things to be considerate and make what we post meaningful and relevant to people we talk to regularly.
There has been so much worry about "abuse" (which is really mitigated by the quality of the participants in a community and everyone being listened to more than tech) many may be blindsided by the upside. :)
Rich Felker
@jbowen @futurebird @MastodonEngineering I have a slightly less stringent personal rule never to boost anything with either of their faces shown in the link preview, which quoting should also take care of.
Jason Bowen 🇺🇦
@futurebird @dalias @MastodonEngineering
> I sometimes want to share political news, but it's not tagged with "us pol"
Yes! I've wanted to do exactly that quite a lot recently
myrmepropagandist
@dalias @jbowen @MastodonEngineering
Yeah, I don't see why I should help keep people who do nothing but harm famous and important seeming in ways that go beyond the harm that they do and any effort to stop them.
Which is why I really don't want to hear any gossip about a whole collection of names that dominate the news. This seems to be part of what keep them powerful and I don't know why more people can't see this.
Matěȷ
@MastodonEngineering I have always considered quotes as just links with preview. What else would quotes allow over links with preview? Similarly, how would be the ability to quote any post be less safe than linking to the post?
Mark Hughes
Please stop trying to be like Twitter. That's not what we want.
rinni
@anneroth denke mal das freut dich :-)
Katrine Amberson
@MastodonEngineering Great news. Thanks for sharing with us
Johan Moir (Mastodon)
@MastodonEngineering great!!
Andrecon
@MastodonEngineering Finally! Yipeee
Progressive_democrat_doron
Antoine :mastodon: #FuckUSA
@MastodonEngineering c'est vrai que cette fonctionnalité est manquante sur Mastodon, elle est la bienvenue 😊
Jef Poskanzer
@MastodonEngineering I am very much in favor of this! However... One issue I had with QTs back on birdsite is that they break the conversation, because the author of the quoted tweet did not get notifications of replies to the quote. I thought of a simple way to fix this: make QTs also be a reply to the quoted tweet. Would be nice to see that done here.
Sebastian Dechamp
@MastodonEngineering I can transfer my Facebook online games?
Calculator Bot
Drunken Dave's Yoga Disco
@MastodonEngineering hey guys, love your work. I know you only have so much time to devote to requests, but my biggest issue as a new user has been how difficult it is to figure out how to view replies/comments to picture posts. I still only get it about 1/3 the time. Not at all sure what to click on. Thanks for your efforts, love the platform.
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