It seems like Mastodon is losing its mindshare to #Bluesky among many academics.

I can't help but think this has to do with the self-imposed limitations of Mastdon — lack of quotes, ordered timeline, etc. Makes it less interesting to use, for no real advantage.

Sad, because the underlying decentralization is much more robust.

@academicchatter

@LukasBrausch @academicchatter For every post you quote, a minority gets oppressed, or something like that.

@tiago @LukasBrausch

Social media often includes opinions and sometimes rants, not just arguments and external evidence. Wikipedia !voting in 'WP:' space favours arguments+evidence.

Seems to me it's an issue of dominant influence on a conversation, by switching between groups of followers:

' When people use quotes to reply to other people, conversations become performative power plays. “Heed, my followers, how I dunk on this fool!” ' [1]

[1] fedi.tips/why-cant-i-quote-oth

@academicchatter

@boud @tiago @LukasBrausch @academicchatter As the article says, if they are going to implement it as an opt-in feature to prevent quoting without consent, I'm happy with that.

@asayakkara @boud @tiago @LukasBrausch @academicchatter

❤️ Quoting as long as it is consensual.

For those who don't fully understand consent:

⭐ The default setting is NO.

@crecente @asayakkara @boud @LukasBrausch @academicchatter The idea of needing consent to *cite* to publicly shared information seems completely incongruous to me.

@tiago @asayakkara @boud @LukasBrausch @academicchatter

That might be because "citing" implies content that was designed to be shared in a fashion that social media posts are not.

(e.g. a journal article vs an offhand comment)

Pragmatically: we will never have this functionality unless those resistant to it are given the choice to not have it imposed on them.

@crecente @asayakkara @boud @LukasBrausch @academicchatter

Since Mastodon posts are shared without any explicit licenses, we cannot talk about how they were designed to be shared.

Right now google is indexing everything that we are writing. Good luck asking forcing them to stop.

Also, should authors have the *power* to demand how they public posts are *linked* by others? If so, the internet would be unsustainable.

It is strange to say that linking to something you have publicly posted is an “imposition”!

You say that we will never have this functionality.This is easily disproved, since other fediverse members such as hubzilla have supported quotes for ages (and have not been overrun by toxicity, BTW). So right now you can already be quoted there, and can not opt out of it. Since all your posts have URLS, you can also be quoted from blogs, facebook, newspapers, Xitter, etc.

In fact, I think it's precisely the opposite. It's a matter of time before we have unconstrained quoting and other features. The question is if it will be in the upstream version, or some fork. That's the beauty of free software in the end. The *user* has the freedom to determine what the software does, not the developers.

@tiago @crecente @asayakkara @boud @LukasBrausch @academicchatter

You can link to posts. Nobody is preventing you from doing that.

The fact that that link doesn’t display inline could be solved by any app.

You made the same claim here:
social.skewed.de/@tiago/111176

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@tiago @crecente @asayakkara @boud @LukasBrausch @academicchatter

Now, pointing out that none of these platforms let you easily properly quote and comment on posts, with multiple interleaved bits, that is a different thing. I the end, Usenet was far superior for actual discussions. If I may so how my age…

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