GeopJr
Design brainstorming for quote posts
Mastodon added quote posts. We already supported them in the advanced boost dialog and generally showing them for quite some releases now, but since they are now a part of Mastodon natively, we might as well expose them to the regular view. Almost no clients have implemented them yet so we are kinda on our own. There are a few different parts that need to be considered:
- Composer settings
Tuba's composer already has a quoting state (it shows "Quoting @angela" and shows the post being quoted inline, like replies). Mastodon however introduced per-post quoting settings; users can set whether they want their post being quoted and by whom (everyone, followers, nobody). Mastodon decided the best UX for that was a modal
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/399d2bbf-bfe2-4d54-b515-17d8e6a87522
I don't think it fits at the bottom of our composer as a dropdown, at the same time a nested modal feels like a lot and so does a navigation page (like the schedule post one). On the headerbar we already place some buttons on backends that have more features (local-only toggle and content-type selector), maybe it can be placed there? Or maybe I can make it fit in the bottom but as an icon-only dropdown :/
- Composing features
just fyi, when composing a quote you can't add media or polls 🤷
- Respecting settings
well, up until now, when quotes weren't supported by the backend we'd just append "RE: <link to post>". Morally, I feel like we should adhere to what the post quoting privacy is set to but, I also feel like if someone wants to quote said post, copying the link themselves is not difficult at all.
Our choices are either keeping the current behavior when quoting is disabled (appending "RE:") or disable quoting. Personally leaning towards disabling tbh, don't want to be responsible for any of this.
- Quote button
as mentioned earlier, quoting is part of the advanced boost dialog which is locked behind a setting. Since we want to expose quoting now, we have at least 3 choices:
- Popover when pressing boost like mastodon
no idea what to do about disabled quoting, should we just boost instead of showing the popover or show it regardless in case people accidentally boost when quoting is not allowed and they didn't know?
- Separate button; which we already do for backends that supported quoting
- modal; it will look good on narrow sizes as a bottom drawer, which I think twitter also did (does?)
cc: @bertob (no rush, I'm also not super active atm)
Separate button; which we already do for backends that supported quoting
I'd be down with just trying that, the popovers all seem super convoluted. It means cluttering up the UI for all posts a bit more, but maybe that's fine to avoid the uncertainty of having some button open menus, and others just executing the action directly.
Seems plenty of room for a separate button. The combined button in the official client always makes me nervous if I'm about to boost or actually quote (since they didn't update the button with any indication that there's a menu there).
