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Comment by gargron | Hacker News Reader

This PR is just one part of item MAS-86 on our public roadmap [1] "Markdown formatting for posts" which is meant to enable users to use code spans/blocks and bold and italic text as championed by the Elk third-party app [2]. I believe "rich text" in the PR title is a little not nuanced enough because like before I'm of the position that Mastodon is the wrong medium for long-form articles and the various block-level formatting structures that come with it, but allowing users to use bold text without resorting to mathematical Unicode characters is a win for accessibility.

[1]: https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap [2]: https://elk.zone

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Gargron, I know that you are adverse to quote-tweeting, but I have a lot of lefty friends who want to stay on Facebook despite all the privacy concerns because it lets them share memes/news stories with their IRL friends, sometimes adding context, without having to worry about their boss / landlord / XYZ seeing what they're sharing.

I think that the fact Mastodon allows per-post privacy is a great feature, but the lack of private retweets and/or retweets with context (eg quote tweets) does scare some people away from the platform.

I've seen how quote tweets can be abused, but still believe there is some potential good from the feature in Masto. Any thoughts?

(Yes, it would be trivial for a third party frontend to add quote tweets, but because that's trivial I'm not asking about that.)

There are forks who use URL unfurling to simulate quotes, so I think this can be a good approach if you can convince your instance to migrate... but, of course, every other instance won't see them nor will the desktop/mobile clients that don't implement this feature.

Other fedi implementations (Pleroma, Misskey) seems to support this approach too.

For now, easiest way seems to be a manual quote, as we did retweets before twitter had RTs.

I don't understand why quote-boosting can't be a user-selected option.

  • Allow users to opt-in/out the ability to perform a quote-boost.
  • Allow users to opt-in/out the ability to see others' quote-boosts.
  • Allow server admins to opt-in/out the quote-boost feature.

Wouldn't this solve everyone's issue with quote-resharing?

The main issue is not covered by any of those cases, it'd need to be:

* Allow users to opt-in/out of their posts being quote-boosted by others.

Neither Mastodon nor Activitypub has a permissions system that supports that sort of thing. Perhaps it needs one.

Perhaps. My comment wasn't based on technical feasibility, but specifying the particular concern which is why Mastodon and several other ActivityPub projects do not support quote-boosts.

It effectively can't have that. Quote statuses are practically just a special way of formatting a link to another status in the message text at the moment. There's a proposal iirc to try and create a more genericized version by extending AP, but it's stalled if memory serves me right.

Even so, you're going to have implementations that will happily ignore those choices; as long as the body of an external post is obtainable in some way (right now most info is just in the embed meta tags), someone can make a version of it that ignores permissions.

Any permissions system is, of course a polite suggestion since ActivityPub pushes content to a large number of other peoples' computers in the typical case. The whole network depends on most servers being relatively well-behaved so I don't think that's a barrier.

Ah yes, especially that.

> it lets them share memes/news stories with their IRL friends, sometimes adding context

Why not just copy/paste the image or URL to share a meme or news story with added context?

Get on a server running the glitch or treehouse forks, 5000 characters and quote-toots. Mainline Mastodon is very much in catching-up mode with its own forks.

The https://mathstodon.xyz/ instance loads mathjax in the web interface which allows people to type latex math in their toots.

I would really love it, if there was push from Mastodon, to get app developers to also load Mathjax or similar parsing library within the app itself.

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