Note that I said "quoted posts", not "quote posts", don't @ me!
After the last WG meeting @thisismissem@hachyderm.io@trwnh@mastodon.social and I chatted a bit about how NodeBB handles quoted posts, but also in relation to quote posts. I thought that it was an interesting chat that merited further discussion; also because some of it was over my head.
When asked how NodeBB handles blockquotes specifically, I replied that blockquotes themselves are rather simple. We set a copy of the text wrapped in <blockquote>.
The rationale is simple: forums typically represent content in a linear fashion, and quoted posts are a handy way to reinforce subcontext within a topic. A typical topic/thread could have many separate discussions all happening together (aka thread drift), so quotes help others know what you're responding to. We don't have special handling or references to our blockquotes because there is a history in forums of edited blockquotes.
Perhaps you want to have a block quote and add some emphasis?
It's also better netiquette (god, that term is old) to trim down the quote to only the relevant parts.
Another upside is that a copy-paste of a post preserves that post to history. That can be useful if the quoted user tries to edit their post later, etc.
vis-a-vis the concept of "quote posts", which I take to mean an embedded post within a post, allowing for replies, likes, etc. How that is represented via ActivityPub is probably detailed in some FEP, but NodeBB doesn't implement that yet. It's a more complicated mechanism that requires a lot more thinking through, and to be honest, we haven't had the need for that in the 10+ years we've been building NodeBB.
This also reminds me of a discussion I had way back when I first joined fedi, with @leroy@indiehackers.social. When mocking up a forum-like frontend for ActivityPub data*, he actually rendered the content of the inReplyTo as a blockquote before the reply, which is actually quite an interesting use-case for inReplyTo!
* Also, is there anything more indie hacker than that? lol
I ended up not continuing with this idea. I still really like the simplicity of it BUT it suffers from the fact that people might have auto-deletion of their posts, which can cause gaps in data quite quickly. Which goes against my love of forums (a trove of data for future âgenerations*â).
*generation in this use means a person looking for same knowledge, but itâs new to them
@silverpill@thisismissem@julian I think you could define a Quote type that is a subclass of Link and use microsyntax to find-and-replace the blockquote with a rich entity with `content` or maybe even `preview`. But this generally makes sense only when you want that rich entity, and not just a "simple" blockquote.
Discourse for example uses [quote] tags kinda like bbcode, and they add metadata something like [quote author:someone,thread:2319,post:69] where the metadata is used in the preview.
@silverpill@thisismissem@julian I think you could define a Quote type that is a subclass of Link and use microsyntax to find-and-replace the blockquote with a rich entity with `content` or maybe even `preview`. But this generally makes sense only when you want that rich entity, and not just a "simple" blockquote.
Discourse for example uses [quote] tags kinda like bbcode, and they add metadata something like [quote author:someone,thread:2319,post:69] where the metadata is used in the preview.
@trwnh@mastodon.social part of the reason we don't do this special syntax is because we (probably) made the conscious decision to keep the composer as simple as possible so that end users wouldn't have to relearn a bespoke syntax.
... but I'm not really sure anymore. My rationale could just be post facto lol
@julian yeah, if you have a rich composer it's less bad. i don't think i've ever manually authored a quote tag in Discourse, for example. every single time i quote someone it's via the floating button that appears when you select something, or via the dropdown menu option
@julian yeah, if you have a rich composer it's less bad. i don't think i've ever manually authored a quote tag in Discourse, for example. every single time i quote someone it's via the floating button that appears when you select something, or via the dropdown menu option
The ability to arbitrarily and retroactively remove all traces of yourself from a discussion you had in public, via a quasi-persistent medium has always felt to me like a violation of everyone else in the discussion, but I, too, come from the forum space, where you just donât do that. The microblogging space doesnât seem to care, and the microblogging space currently dominates fedi. It kind of feels like a culture clash to me, and one of many reasons why forum-fedi and masto-fedi probably donât need a whole lot of cross-over.
I know there are safety concerns around harassment campaigns and the like, and things should change and evolve in response to stuff like that. And itâs not at all clear to me how something like this interacts with the EUâs Right to be Forgotten. But forum users posting on forums, though distributed, are much less likely to be a disruption to those forums than masto users who donât even know that theyâre posting on forums, while behaving in ways that are normal for their space.
@Kichae Ideally, people should be notified that they are posting to a forum and not replying to a post on an individual channel, that way we can set some expectations in advance.
I am not sure how ActivityPub handles it, but Hubzilla somehow communicates with other Hubzilla instances that a particular channel is a forum. Itâs probably communicated in webfinger, or something like that.
Just having an icon, tag, or Bootstrap-style badge next to a channel saying âforumâ would be helpful.
@Kichae Ideally, people should be notified that they are posting to a forum and not replying to a post on an individual channel, that way we can set some expectations in advance.
I am not sure how ActivityPub handles it, but Hubzilla somehow communicates with other Hubzilla instances that a particular channel is a forum. Itâs probably communicated in webfinger, or something like that.
Just having an icon, tag, or Bootstrap-style badge next to a channel saying âforumâ would be helpful.
Note that I said "quoted posts", not "quote posts", don't @ me!
After the last WG meeting @thisismissem@hachyderm.io@trwnh@mastodon.social and I chatted a bit about how NodeBB handles quoted posts, but also in relation to quote posts. I thought that it was an interesting chat that merited further discussion; also because some of it was over my head.
When asked how NodeBB handles blockquotes specifically, I replied that blockquotes themselves are rather simple. We set a copy of the text wrapped in <blockquote>.
The rationale is simple: forums typically represent content in a linear fashion, and quoted posts are a handy way to reinforce subcontext within a topic. A typical topic/thread could have many separate discussions all happening together (aka thread drift), so quotes help others know what you're responding to. We don't have special handling or references to our blockquotes because there is a history in forums of edited blockquotes.
Perhaps you want to have a block quote and add some emphasis?
It's also better netiquette (god, that term is old) to trim down the quote to only the relevant parts.
Another upside is that a copy-paste of a post preserves that post to history. That can be useful if the quoted user tries to edit their post later, etc.
vis-a-vis the concept of "quote posts", which I take to mean an embedded post within a post, allowing for replies, likes, etc. How that is represented via ActivityPub is probably detailed in some FEP, but NodeBB doesn't implement that yet. It's a more complicated mechanism that requires a lot more thinking through, and to be honest, we haven't had the need for that in the 10+ years we've been building NodeBB.
Quotes should involve resources. With the current citation mechanism, if the user deletes the original post, the quoted content will still exist. The ideal mechanism is that if the user deletes the original post, the quoted content should also be deleted. This is very important for the federation system, so I think the citation system should be upgraded to display the quoted content through pid and forum-fedi.
Quotes should involve resources. With the current citation mechanism, if the user deletes the original post, the quoted content will still exist. The ideal mechanism is that if the user deletes the original post, the quoted content should also be deleted.
In MOST forum contexts: no way!
Seriously, that would break the fundemental context of a forum. Especially in all areas that follow the GDPR types of privacy law. (Since you are allowed and recomended to delete all your data, if you leave a service). I´m willing to accept there are some areas for forums that mimic SoMe, where this makes sense, but most forums are content- and conversations oriented, and nonone should be able to one-sided sensor a community.
This is a Fedi problem, and need a tailored Fedi solution.