Pre-FEP: Quote posts, quote policies and quote controls

[Claire]

@silverpill

@Claire

Interesting, do you have more examples?

Mitra and Threads.

@Claire

In any case, as:quoteUrl, fedibird:quoteUri and _misskey_quote seem to be by far the most common ways to represent a quote in the current fediverse.

FEP-e232 has at least 9 implementations. All of them use FEP-e232 for quoting, even if specific relation type is not used, so it is one of the most common representations, if not the most common.

Thanks! I think your statement might be slightly misleading. After a quick review, out of these 9 projects, I believe the following to be true:

• Hollo supports and outputs _misskey_quote, quoteUrl, and _misskey_quote
• Bridgy Fed understands and outputs quoteUrl and _misskey_quote
• Threads outputs _misskey_quote
• Pleroma outputs quoteUrl and quoteUri and handles _misskey_quote
• Friendica understands quoteUrl, quoteUri, _misskey_quote and outputs quoteUrl
• Iceshrimp.NET understands and outputs quoteUrl, quoteUri, and _misskey_quote
• Mitra understands and outputs quoteUrl
• FoundKey understands and outputs _misskey_quote and quoteUri
• Streams understands quoteUrl, quoteUri and _misskey_quote but does not seem to output any of them (if I’ve looked correctly)

In short, except for Mitra, they all understand _misskey_quote; and except for Streams (if I’ve read it properly), they all output at least one of _misskey_quote or quoteUrl. So I don’t think the compatibility argument really is in favor of FEP-e232 (even though it’s not exactly a bad choice in that respect either)

Stepping aside from the compatibility argument, we have been told, and share the feeling that FEP-e232 kind of reinvents RDF within RDF. If we want to define a relation type, we may as well define a JSON-LD attribute in the first place, especially since we expect some specific behavior around quote posts. There is also the fact that in certain cases (e.g.) self-quotes, it might be useful to embed the quoted object rather than link to it, which is not possible with FEP-e232.

For these reasons, we are strongly considering using as:quoteUrl, _misskey_quote or a new https://w3id.org/fep/044f#quote attribute:

• as:quoteUrl is one of the most commonly supported representations of quote posts; however it does refer to the object as Url, which is at odds with other definitions, and is not formally backed with anything, and there is no reason the object couldn’t be inlined; furthermore, it re-uses the ActivityStreams namespace without being defined there
• _misskey_quote is also one of the most commonly supported representations of quote posts, and unlike as:quoteUrl, it does not re-use the ActivityStreams namespace, and does not imply the value is an URL; it does have an unusual naming scheme, and specifically mentions misskey, which is a bit awkward, but not a showstopper
• quote would define exactly what we want, not implying an URL, and having a very descriptive name; it doesn’t clash with any commonly-used shorthand within another namespace, and namespacing it to the FEP would allow good discovery of the mechanisms we want to promote; it would not be compatible with any current implementation, however, but adding basic compatibility would be easy for any project currently implementing either of as:quoteUrl, _misskey_quote or quoteUri; we would also have a section on compatibility so that implementers are aware of these implementations and may chose to provide compatibility