FEP-044f capabilities (Mastodon-style quote posts)

[jfietkau]

Summary

I took a look around to see whether this has been requested yet, but it doesn't look like it.

FEP-044f is a specification for quote posts that require permission (manual or automatic) from the author of the post being quoted. This permission is individually revocable and verifiable by third parties. The functionality for end users that results from this FEP can be seen in this Mastodon blog post.

Problem

It is worth noting that even if an ActivityPub platform is not interested in authoring FEP-044f-style quote posts (such as would be the case for most simple bots), some FEP-044f implementation work is required to make normal public posts quotable by Mastodon and other implementations that only render FEP-044f quotes. That is also my motivation for requesting this feature: I would like for Encyclia posts to be quotable on Mastodon eventually. 🙂

But also, other software that relies on Fedify, such as Ghost, might want to author Mastodon-compatible quote posts in the future.

Proposed Solution

Fedify could add support for FEP-044f types and interactions to enable authoring quotes and giving permission to be quoted by other platforms that implement FEP-044f.

While FEP-044f it is still in draft status at time of writing, recent Mastodon releases have pushed it into the limelight and have prompted a number of independent implementations. GoToSocial (which invented the interaction policies used by FEP-044f) will have a compatible quoting mechanism in its version 0.20, ActivityPub for WordPress supports it as of version 7.5.0 out today, and other confirmed live implementations are found in Smithereen, Micro.blog, dotmakeup, and ActivityBot.

Alternatives Considered

Fedify already supports FEP-e232, which some implementations use for (permissionless) quote posts, as well as, to my understanding, the not really standardized Misskey quotes. Mastodon supports consuming Misskey quote relations if they are either an account quoting itself (i.e. permission is implied) or they come with a permission verification as per FEP-044f. But I think it would be easy to emit the FEP-044f-recommended quote property next to the Misskey one, assuming the verification stamp types are in place.

In general, the quote post implementation space in ActivityPub is fairly varied and discussions of it seem occasionally fierce. I recommend the SocialHub thread leading up to FEP-044f if an extended read about the landscape is desired.

Scope / Dependencies

I don't know if anyone has tried to build an ActivityPub server that fully supports FEP-044f as well as Misskey quotes. There will probably be edge cases that need to be figured out, but I believe most of them would manifest at a level above Fedify, i.e. Hollo, BotKit, and other Fedify users would have to worry about which quote posting mode to use under what circumstances.