Mark T. Tomczak<p>Let me take three or four paragraphs to talk about fighting in hockey. This is a post about social networks.</p><p>Here's the secret about fights in hockey: almost all of them are mutually-consensual. They will occasionally do the sound-cone-pointed-at-the-players thing to players about to fight. You know what they say to each other before throwing punches? "Hey. You wanna fight?"</p><p>And this is because (a) fans love it, (b) it gets two players a breather, (c) it's a way for the players who aren't brilliant at the other skills of the game yet to make a name for themselves, and (d) <em>it's not illegal.</em></p><p>Oh, there's a penalty. But the penalty is the box. The penalty is not "What the fuck? Both of you are expelled for unsportsmanlike conduct, and if this shit happens again we'll fine your whole team."</p><p>And it won't be, ever, unless something truly tragic happens, because (a) the fans love it.</p><p>(There's a whole other post about that "truly tragic" qualifier. Suffice to say that this is a sport where people strap blunt knives to their shoes and carry 3-and-a-half-foot sticks; the violence of a one-on-one shove-and-punch is <em>of relative degree</em> to everything else happening on the ice).</p><p>Okay, so great. Why bring this up?</p><p>Rules matter.</p><p>And by creating a controlled, protocol-specified method of quote-posting, Mastodon has <a href="https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/02/bringing-quote-posts-to-mastodon/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">created a new rule</a>, which implicitly divides quote-posting into two kinds:</p><ol><li><p>The new, polite, "use the feature and if someone doesn't want to be quoted they can flag their post as 'unquotable'" kind.</p></li><li><p>The currently-supported-everywhere "each post is an HTTP resource, resources can be uniquely identified, the only thing someone can do about you <em>linking to their post</em> is <em>take the whole post down then beg you to help the Internet forget something once existed on the Internet</em> kind.</p></li></ol><p>... which is now the 'rude' kind but wasn't previously quite so rude because it was the only technically supported kind.</p><p>(In the interest of completeness, there is a third, far-more-considered-rude kind, "link the post and attach a screenshot," which implies you think the other party will <em>attempt</em> to memory-hole what they said.)</p><p>But it's fun to observe how new protocol features can push etiquette around on a social network.</p><p>This has been a meditation on how the rules shape the game; thank you for coming to my Toot Talk.</p><p><a href="https://mastodon.fixermark.com/tags/hockey" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>hockey</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.fixermark.com/tags/elbowsup" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>elbowsup</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.fixermark.com/tags/mastodon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>mastodon</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.fixermark.com/tags/socialmedia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>socialmedia</span></a> <a href="https://mastodon.fixermark.com/tags/toottalk" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>toottalk</span></a></p>