This was sort of why the "via" credit and HT/hat tip (o "^") evolved on Twitter. Over time, the practice faded out. I still use it from time-to-time. I wouldn't mind if fedi posts had fetchable "paths" so we could follow the sharing lineage that got something in front of our eyeballs.

HT @evan

@shoq

Oh I like the HT indicator. I wasn't aware it used to be a thing over there. I think I'm going to adopt it for my comments. And yes, it's insufficient to trace the chain of boosts that brings things to your eyes, but it's still better than nothing. Although I'm not sure how I should keep the information around in this reply for example, should I HT @evan too or just leave it as a normal citation or maybe remove it? What would the best etiquette be?

@shoq@evan

(BTW, I think the lack of “boost tracing” is part of the “anti-virality” of Mastodon. Not sure if/how the protocol handles these things.)

@shoq Google+ had really lovely visualisations of how content spread. I haven't seen a lot of other platforms do tracing before.

In ActivityPub, "boosting" is an Announce activity. So you can boost someone's boost. It's nice for tracing origins.

@evan
You can boost someone's boost, but can this information actually be recovered from someone? Or is it only available to admins and the original author (if at all)?

@shoq

@shoq I haven't looked closely enough at the Mastodon implementation to say.