Disambiguating various interpretations of a "quote" feature [pre-FEP]

[trwnh]

@trwnh

The quote boost

The purpose of a share (Announce) is to draw attention to, boost, or republish the referenced object. Functionally, when sent to the author of that object, the author can add the Announce activity to the shares collection on that object. This gets interpreted as a “boost” or “reblog” within most current implementations.[4]

It is possible to add content to your Announce activity; a generic presentation of activities can use the natural-language properties name, summary, and content along with actor type object in order to generate a representation of the activity.

@trwnh

Quote boosts (reshare with comment)

• (~) Might be semantically appropriate, if the “sharing” aspect of the “quote post” is what you intended.
• (-) Falls back to a normal boost, without displaying the added content at all.

Throwing a remix of this idea into the ring as well:

The quote activity

Instead of an Announce with content, we can define a new Activity type Quote that can be used similarly, but has different semantics. Whereas an Announce is defined like so:

Indicates that the actor is calling the target 's attention the object .

So instead of “calling for attention”, the Quote activity would instead be defined semantically as:

Quote
: Indicates that the actor is quoting the object verbatim in its entirety.

The “quote activity” might also instead be named something else to avoid potential conflicts with other shorthand terms. Something like Cite could also work. Alternatively, other disambiguated senses of the word may be represented in the noun form as a Quotation or Citation.

• (~) No fallback. This could be either good or bad, depending on if you want a fallback or if you want the semantics to be respected.
• (+) With the existence of a quotes collection (even if the items might be private), we can use its IRI as the target of an Add which acts as a stamp of inclusion in a parallel way to how one might signal an Add into the likes, shares, replies, context, etc collections.
• (+) In theory supports one or multiple object references, but even if you limit the cardinality to 1, this at least “frees up” the inReplyTo property for cases where you might reply to one post while quoting a different post. It also remains possible to Quote an object while also declaring that your Quote is inReplyTo the same object.