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@ariadne@treehouse.systemsanyway, thanks for everything treehouse quoted posts patch 
but tonight I am told we will finally be deploying Mastodon 4.5 (or at least there is a scheduled window to try, it may slip a few days).
thanks to @lina for writing the necessary code to migrate treehouse-style quotes to upstream-compatible quotes.
but as the treehouse quotes patch rides off into the sunset, it would be nice to reflect on why we made it and where it came from.
a thread.
@ariadneit was 2022, we had just launched treehouse mastodon as an alternative to X after Elon bought it.
we did this because our community members expressed concern for their ability to continue having freedom of speech on X.
but at the time Mastodon did not support quoteposting, a feature our users wanted. other fediverse software like Misskey and Pleroma did, however.
or... did Mastodon actually not support quoteposting? in Japan, there was a patch.
@ariadnewhat do I mean by "Japan had a patch" here?
well -- the Japanese fediverse is a bit different culturally and technically from mainline. a lot of Mastodon instances in the Japanese fediverse run older versions of Mastodon because they have significant patchsets that are hard to forward port.
anyway, one of the largest Japanese Mastodon instances, fedibird, had a quote patch for Mastodon 2.1 or something.
@ariadneanyway, I spent an evening extracting the relevant patches for quoting support from fedibird's Mastodon tree, localized it to work well in English locales, and shipped it.
but then people complained that the patch did not support Misskey quotes.
well, that is because Misskey had an entirely different protocol extension for quotes.
so I added code to translate Misskey quotes to Fedibird quotes.
and voila: we had quoting that worked with everything that presently existed.
but... the quotes were ugly. the compose experience was color-coded (green = quotes, blue = reply). this was accessible to power users, but not to normal users. we got a lot of questions about it.
so... we redesigned the compose experience.
@ariadnetoday this is what the compose experience looks like. it is not great, at some point some of the CSS broke and we did not have time to fix it because we needed to upgrade quickly to fix a security problem.
but it was better than the color-coded stuff fedibird had going on.
@ariadnefinally, our users suggested that tumblr-style quotes would be better. so we modified the patch further to put the quote *above* the reaction to the quote.
i still think this is a good design decision, because it lowers temperature.
i will be disappointed when we cross over to mainline Mastodon's quoting because they do not work this way.
@ariadne if my feed suddenly becomes a lot of dunk posts I will be very sad, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case thankfully
@ariadne and I very much thank you for all that. I'm sure that it helped finally getting quotes in upstream, even if the chosen feature space is... Creative.