With a little nudge from @catboomer, we've been having some conversations about #Pinetta as a content discovery mechanism for the #Fediverse. Seeing as it can potentially federate with and display everything on the Fedi via #ActivityPub, that means people who want to could use it to curate their own personal collections of what's good—sort of like a DIY FediFollows. Pretty nice idea.
Now, to me, that raises lots of questions about what I'm calling content sovereignty—that is, a user is the boss of what they post. Users should be able to opt out of *their own content* being shared in other people's collections in this way, just as they should be able to opt out of comments and so on. This means that if you use #Pinetta and opt out of sharing for all your posts, another Pinetta user won't be able share it; ideally boosts/AP announce from elsewhere will be disallowed as well.
I don't know what others think, but I feel as though this concept of content sovereignty is a useful step towards setting boundaries for healthy online interactions and relationships. It certainly does put a damper on certain types of social media interactions (for example, Black Twitter's use of quote tweets could be hampered if the OP disallows shares). But at the same time, I feel like it mirrors moral structures that many of us would like to see in the world.
What do you think #Fedi?
@dragfyre a couple thoughts:
First, re: boundaries, an anecdote. A local community member spent some time pioneering in a Pacific island country. He identified some differences in cultural norms, notably that their threshold for eye contact before it was perceived as staring ("bad face") was much lower, and their threshold for personal space was much higher, so that everyone stood several metres apart when queueing up at the McDonald's.
I later imagined the reverse, a visitor from that country to the West - he'd probably feel very uncomfortable that everyone is, from his perspective, staring at him and crowding him, but he has no real standing to demand more separation in the lines at our McDonald's, or that the cashier not look him in the face when serving him. The thought experiment exposed to me a fundamental problem in the way we talk about personal boundaries: we don't, in fact, unilaterally set our own; they're the result of social consensus. The debate over quote toots is a natural and healthy attempt to establish that consensus - a good chunk of the Fediverse now expects that functionality, but many existing instances don't.
Second, the way quotes are implemented here on QOTO is that the text includes a link prefixed with QT. Quote-aware clients simply follow the link and render the toot; the vanilla frontend ignores this and just gives you the raw hyperlink. I don't see any practical way to implement "forbid people elsewhere on the internet to paste a link to my post" with how ActivityPub works, but maybe we don't need to.
My understanding of the anti-quote argument is that it enables unhealthy behaviours because, unlike the reply functionality, it doesn't notify the original author so he can't rebut the quoting author's attached commentary, leading to one-sided "dunking" instead of open discussion. So what if we approached this from the other side? Rather than preventing the behaviour, simply detect it and issue the notification as you would for any other interaction. The technical end would look something like this: when your instance becomes aware of a toot containing a link to a post on your instance, via either ActivityPub or the Referer header of an incoming request, and that link isn't already in-thread wrt the link target, generate a notification for the original author ("@user@example.org quoted your toot") and add the quoted post and its author to the in-reply-to-id and in-reply-to-account-id fields so it'll be treated as in-thread in case you become aware of it again.
