Note that I said “quoted posts”, not “quote posts”, don’t @ me!

After the last WG meeting @[email protected] @[email protected] 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.

  • Christian Stange@community.nodebb.org
    1·
    6 days ago

    @[email protected] said in Quoted posts:

    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 don’t do that. The microblogging space doesn’t 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 don’t need a whole lot of cross-over.

    This is a VERY interesting point, and I think it comes from the difference of context between forums and microblogging : A Forum always har a context and community : the message stand by itself, the user is secondary. Microblogging is more a way to communicate yourself ; the message is secondary.

    Which makes the crossover a can of worms : A message from a forum published out of contex of the forum discussion to the Microverse, can be as bad as a miss-composed message being published as a forumpost.

    On the other side, the value of fedi is in the ability to solve these kinds of context switches. It should be a part of HOW we do fedi.

    • KichaeEnglish
      1·
      5 days ago

      Microblogs are also treats as ephemeral spaces, which is why people have long been caught off-guard by their old Tweets wrecking their lives. It’s a space where people behave as if they’re having a vocal conversation, and the form of ‘public’ they’re in is like a public park. People are around who could hear, but they have to be at the park and nearby as it’s said to hear. The idea that someone could show up to the park 5 years later and put up a fuss over something that was casually expressed is an impossibility.

      People have never treated forums as ephemeral. They’ve always been quasi-permanent spaces, where even the ability to edit your posts or replies is often time gated, or outright disallowed.