What about using the blockquote format with > ?
Snippet from someone else’s post
by: @eapl.me@eapl.me
Would it not also make sense to have the repost be a reply to the original post using the (#twthash), and maybe using a tag like #repost so it eaier to filter them out?
Well, I’ll describe basic microblogging actions as:
Reply - Extend a conversation, create a new twt in reply to another
Boost, Retweet, Repost - Silently show a twt to your followers (maybe to share some interesting URL to follow based on that twt)
Quote - Start a new conversation based on a previous twt (debatable, for instance Masto doesn’t have this one, has to be done manually)
To go back a few steps I was checking this doc:
https://dev.twtxt.net/doc/twtsubjectextension.html
Reply is already covered there. Allows to tag someone with @ which I think is good enough to start following that URL to see the whole conv.
For quoting, I like your idea of using ‘>’
It could be something like
(#hash) @<nick url> > "Quoted text"\nThen a comment
Finally for boosting, there’s no syntax to do that.
Since I was using
[lang=en]
to define a twt in a language different than the default one, I was thinking on something similar.
Perhaps
(#hash) @<nick url> [boost]
Meaning, “hey! see that twt with hash # from that URL”
@eapl.me@eapl.me this is interesting. Is the square bracket something used in the wild for multilingual twts?
@prologic@twtxt.net what are your thoughts? Should we extend the parser to handle [lang=] and [boost] ? Or a generic attribute spec. Single word is a boolean attribute. And one with an = is a string key/value.
I’m also more in favor of #reposts being human readable and writable. A client might implement a bottom that posts something simple like: #repost Look at this cool stuff, because bla bla [alt](url)
This will then make it possible to also “repost” stuff from other platforms/protocols.
The reader part of a client, can then render a preview of the link, which we talked about would be a nice (optional) feature to have in yarnd.
@sorenpeter@darch.dk this makes sense as a quote twt that references a direct URL. If we go back to how it developed on twitter originally it was RT @nick: original text because it contained the original text the twitter algorithm would boost that text into trending.
i like the format (#hash) @<nick url> > "Quoted text"\nThen a comment
as it preserves the human read able. and has the hash for linking to the yarn. The comment part could be optional for just boosting the twt.
The only issue i think i would have would be that that yarn could then become a mess of repeated quotes. Unless the client knows to interpret them as multiple users have reposted/boosted the thread.
The format is also how iphone does reactions to SMS messages with +number liked: original SMS