ActivityPub Quote Posts

Quote posts are a popular feature of online social media platforms. They offer the ability to share another persons post to ones own followers, while adding a comment. Interestingly, so far this seemingly obvious concept has not been standardised - meaning there is no agreed way to implement this feature into an W3C ActivityPub implementation in a way that is automatically interoperable with the other applications in the Fediverse.

Quoting is a simple but powerful feature that can help to quickly grow audiences and convey trust and respect, but in the hands of the wrong people it can also be used for malicious purposes: to misquote people, or to intentionally quote someone out of context. Since people 'have actually said it', quotes can easily be levered to rally hate speech and harass people.

This project will design an ActivityPub implementation of quote posts that tries to avoid this. It will attempt to remove some of the liabilities, and reduce the risk of weaponisation. The goals is to write an ActivityPub protocol extension proposal (a so called FEP) for quote posting, which will be implemented directly in Mastodon to see if the design holds up. Having a specification, allows everyone to efficiently implement this same feature in an interoperable way.