Mastodon quote posts in Micro.blog
Today we’re announcing support for Mastodon quote posts in Micro.blog. This is a new feature in Mastodon 4.5 that has been in development for quite some time. It is live on mastodon.social and mastodon.online, the two servers run by Mastodon gGmbH, and it will be rolling out to other Mastodon servers when version 4.5 is final.
How does Micro.blog support this? As I blogged about in February, I was skeptical of Mastodon’s approach. It is pretty complicated, especially for ActivityPub developers. But as I unravelled the different pieces, there were a couple key benefits that I wanted to support in Micro.blog:
- Quoted posts on Mastodon should display nicely in Micro.blog.
- Mastodon users should be able to quote Micro.blog posts.
Because of how quote posts work in Mastodon, that second point is not automatic. If you use mastodon.social right now, you will notice many posts from across the fediverse that do not allow quoting. Mastodon decided to prioritize consent and disable quoting until other servers have updated to Mastodon 4.5, where users can control the default to allow or disallow quoting.
Micro.blog has a different perspective. The social web is by default open, and people have been quoting other blogs for decades. While there are potential consequences with one-click, easy quoting, it’s a better fit for Micro.blog to assume a microblog post can be quoted.
If one of your posts has been quoted by a Mastodon user in a way that you don’t like — such as to encourage the user’s followers to personally attack you — the advantage of Mastodon’s approach is that you can withdraw your support. Micro.blog also allows this.
For more details and screenshots, check out the help page I wrote this morning. Happy quoting!