It's kinda weird to think about a social network where businesses own their own presences, rather than relying on a capricious third party service like Twitter or Facebook. Imagine NBC or The Verge running a Mastodon instance for their reporters to toot from, or Bethesda operating an instance for PR and customer support. No more lost business when Facebook changes their algorithms again because they need more money from boosted posts.
Weird, right?
@alahmnat Hmm, it seems you can't quote someone's message in order to reply to it and post it in your feed... But yeah, the thing is, it's not weird at all. This is exactly how email works, how IRC works, how websites themselves work. It's Facebook, Twitter, etc, who are the weird ones, really...
@alahmnat I feel they threw the baby out with the bath water by removing that. On Twitter, I use them to reply in a "public" way, and to humorously remark on another tweet. I don't really use them for "me too" posts. Frankly, one of the weaknesses of Twitter is that you can't really share Twitter threads you participated in with your followers.
@ThorTheNorseman @alahmnat From what I heard, they just deprioritised it as a feature. It's not that it'll never get implemented, more like it'll take a while. (Of course, someone could implement it themselves then send a PR)
@alahmnat And yeah, the problem, I think, is that it's much easier to monetize something you can control... and open source software tends to suffer from a lacking user experience. It's always about 80% there featurewise, with the other 20% being neglected forever.
@ThorTheNorseman Yeah, as I understand it, toot quoting is something that's been explicitly left out to combat bandwagoning. And you're right, it's only weird because social media has been centralized for so much of its mainstream history, while everything else is just understood to behave in a decentralized manner. Kinda wonder what things would be like if social had stayed like this *gestures around*.