@jdp23 Yes, due to the diversity of ActivityPub implementations, it will be hard (or impossible) to 100% control what is happening. And you can always link to a status, or screenshot it. But any speed bump adds friction, and friction is an effective tool against most harassment.
Yeah I understand how it is impossible for any AP software to 100% control what's happening. But I think focusing on people using links/screenshots to sidestep limitations people set is a bit of a red herring: these are wellknown patterns, commonly used on other platforms as well.
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What concerns is me the potential situation where a Mastodon user sets a post to dontquote, and another user on another fedi software that has a different qp implementation that doesnt interoperate with dontquote rule then still quotes the post. More specifically, what will that social dynamic be like, and who will users blame for who's at fault here
@laurenshof the FEP mandates that you implement and respect the controls if you support quotes according to the FEP. If you write invalid software with potential malicious intent, I suspect you will quickly end up on many blocklist (like it already happens).
If you don’t support the FEP, then Mastodon won’t display it as a quote post, for example we don’t plan to support the current quote post « implementations » (RE: <url>) and such
@jdp23 @andypiper
this is not about software with malicious intent, this is about platforms like misskey that have had quote posts 5 year before mastodon had
People have been quote posting Mastodon posts using *key platforms for a long while now, this is a settled pattern, I did this regularly when using firefish. But now Mastodon is introducing a 'dontquoteme' feature thats not supported by *key.
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How are people on *key supposed to know that a Mastodon post is not supposed to be quoted? That fully depends on the willingness of *key devs to implement your other noncompatible implementation of quoteposts. And in order to get them to do it you need to do federated diplomacy.
That's why I'm concerned with Mastodons declarative stance of 'this is how we are going to bring quote posts to the entire fediverse', because it makes the diplomacy harder
It's tricky. I agree on the importance of federated diplomacy, and certainly hope that Mastodon is working with other platforms. But on the other hand, today's fediverse wasn't designd with safety in mind, and to move forward there are going to have to be incompatibilities.
It's like GoToSocial's interaction controls ... they're not a priority for other projects (including Mastodon), I'm not sure whether the FEP has stabilized, and challenging for to implement, so until that happens they're likely to lead to unexpected behavior which will result in some conflict. But they''e still a good thing!
For that matter it's similar to post visibility and blocking when Mastodon first introduced it in 2016/7. And sure enough it led to huge fights with GnuSocial and other impletations that *didn't* support post visibility -- if I recall correctly, Robek even talks about that in the post about tensions between Masodon and other platforms. But guess what, people wanted that functionality, and it' helped lead to Mastodon risking to dominance.
Of course it's not an exact analogy: Mastodon now has much broader usage than these other platforms, so needs to be careful about being seen as the big elephant in the room throwing its weight around. And the current team, through no fault of their own, also inherits the mistrust from Eugen's "Mastodon-first" attitude. So it's complex. I haven't been tracking what's been going on in terms of the FEP discussions, if it's really Mastodon making a unilateral declarative stance then I agree with Laurens that it's not a helpful way to go about it.
But on the other hand, I'm currently seeing a post by Claire on socialhub described as a "pre-FEP." So that doesn't seem like a unilateral declaration to me. So maybe one of the issues here is the tone of the blog post coming across as more absolutist then the reality. But then again maybe the tone of blog post actively reflects the reality! (1/2)
Edited 60d ago
@jdp23 @laurenshof @renchap re blog post, I think given the socialhub discussion and this thread, I've learned that no matter how mindful I thought we had been, there is still more work to do to clarify and demonstrate that we're listening and learning (and working with others).
I think its not so much a matter of being as careful and mindful as possible (while thats obviously a great thing to do), but that fedi is lacking the political layer for diplomacy between different fediverse platforms. 'Listening and Learning' is a framing between a platform and its end-users. But what I think is going wrong here is not seeing other platforms as equal partners that need to be negotiated with
this is not only a Mastodon problem, but a wider fediverse problem. We only have FEPs as a tool for this, but those are technical specifications that are being mangled into a diplomacy framework. Which, not surprisingly, is kind of difficult to do well
@laurenshof This is indeed a big "issue" (is it really an issue? idk) as there is no formal diplomacy process. We (Mastodon) do not plan to solve this issue for everyone, but we have established some (closed) places to have discussions with other implementors. Our FEP draft was shared & commented on those places for several weeks/months before being made public.