Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TaylorAlexander 1225 days ago
This has been discussed to death on mastodon already. However recently the mastodon devs added this feature to their short list of what they are working on. (I think they said they are “exploring” it.)

Quote toots offer a functionality not offered by other functions, which is the ability to show two toots at once as well as notify the original toot owner of this activity. Linking another toot has a pretty horrible UX in comparison. Last time I clicked on a linked toot, it opened a new tab to view it, and then in order to click like on that toot I was instructed by the UI to copy the toot address to yet another mastodon window in to the search bar. An absolute mess.

Quote toots allow side discussions while allowing everyone to see what is being discussed. And they’re great when someone has a long thread and you want to pull out one piece to share with your followers and add context like “this piece of the puzzle is particularly important.”

The fact that it changes the order of the conversation is the point. Conversations fork in ways not always conducive to a reply-only view.

I primarily want quote toots so I can quote myself to start fresh threads that build on old ones. I did this all the time on Twitter where I posted a thread of updates for every evening that I worked on a project, with a new thread quoting the last one for each new evening. Since replies and links don’t show the other posts, it’s not as clear what I’m talking about when I link to an old toot and say “I made progress on this project tonight” given the awful UX on link toots.
1 comments
jordigh 1225 days ago
The recent wave of Twitter immigration has reignited the quote-toot discussion. People mostly want a silly copy of a half-baked Twitter feature. If we get something like it in Mastodon, I hope it's better thought-out. For example, editing toots was done in an entirely sane way: it's just plain possible to edit toots, and if someone edits a toot you boosted, you get notified, so people can't fool you initially and then insert a completely different idea in your timeline.
link