Refugees from birdsite missing QT Quote Tweet might reflect on conscious design decisions made in Mastodon core, that could be modified in a specific instance. This means that if a poster REALLY wants QT, he or she has the option to move to an instance where that is supported.
Original 2018 Design Decision at https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/cage-the-mastodon/#design-decisions
Pointer from discussion thread from 2000 on Quote Toots https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12753
Just because birdsite declares a unitary design approach doesn't mean that Mastodon developers haven't thought about a feature.
A fork of Mastodon is Fedibird, with features more like Twitter. https://github.com/fedibird/mastodon
The lead developer is @noellabo .
The Fedibird site looks to prefer Japanese writers. https://fedibird.com/explore
If anyone knows of English language Fedibird instances, perhaps we could help others to find them.
> Where retweets carry the veneer of an endorsement, a quote tweet can do so much more—particularly given that Twitter, in its infinite generosity, engineered the format so that the quoted tweet doesn’t count toward the character limit. The result is that you can go long above whatever you don’t like. But it’s often the short tweets that contribute the least.
... wrote #ClaireMcNear
https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/2/17311616/twitter-retweet-quote-endorsement-function-trolls