To my understanding (please take with several grains of salt), some folks felt like it would encourage toxicity since you can essentially mock something someone said without saying it to them directly, while sending your audience to the original post, and I believe for quite some time the plan was intentionally not to add it

On the other hand, I've heard folks suggest that by allowing people to have their own isolated conversation about an idea you can potentially limit some of the harmful consequences of people with large audiences or something, but I don't remember the exact explanation

Personally I'm happy to get quote posts and I'm happy that mastodon is cautious about implementing features that facilitate hostile interactions in the way that major platforms do for engagement

Hopefully someone can chime in with a more informed/detailed explanation, but I thought I'd share what I know in case I'm the only one to reply :)

[–] sakari@mastodon.world 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

@Cris_Color thanks. Friendica has it and i dont see people talking down about it though. I also already seen people being that way (it was a conservative using #justsayin afterward, coming from another instance) on a reply, maybe just notify people of quote posts so its not something equivalent to be talking at their backs without them being aware of it, notification could help

[–] ruud@piefed.world 3 points 4 days ago

Note that for now, quote posts from other platforms will be displayed correctly in Mastodon 4.4. You can't quote posts yet. That will come in 4.5

(I will update mastodon.world tomorrow)

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 7 points 4 days ago

I think quote posts are undesirable for the reasons you mentioned but I have to accept that it will be huge for adoption, and the flip side (promoting others work in a positive light) is also going to be really great.