Now that Mastodon 4.5 is out and we’re starting to see its quote post interactions with Mastodon >=4.4 and other ActivityPub platforms with non-FEP-044f quotes, a question has arisen for me.
Mastodon 4.5 renders posts that advertise no quote policy whatsoever as non-quotable. Given the base assumption that FEP-044f quotes require approval, and implementations without a quote policy are presumably also incapable of issuing FEP-044f approval stamps, this seems like a sensible enough approach, at the cost of some social friction with AP implementations where quoting without approval is part of the generally accepted interaction model.
However, this makes me wonder if there should be some straightforward way for implementers to advertise (at the object level) that something can be freely quoted by FEP-044f implementations without individual approval. I’m thinking about simple public ActivityPub bots, software implementing FEP-b06c, or other contexts where free quoting may be desired, but managing approval stamps for each quote is overly cumbersome. This would also make this FEP much easier to implement for platforms which consider quoting without permission part of their social contract, in order to let people on FEP-044f platforms quote their posts.
Is this something that FEP-044f implementers would be open to? Or would you see it as undermining the purpose?