I know I'm a broken record on this, but I so wish Mastodon had a simple mechanism similar to quote-retweeting.
For me a lot of the fun of Twitter is using someone else's thought as a jumping point for starting a conversation with mutuals/followers.
Direct-replying is great if you want to join a conversation in someone else's community, but that's not always what I want to do.
I remember Twitter when quote retweets were manual, and I felt like I had to really force myself to scan headlines for something to talk about and then bring that to Twitter if I wanted a presence there.
I did it, bc I wanted to use Twitter for my organizing, but it was so unfun.
What really got me to the point of *enjoying* Twitter was the back-and-forth that quote-retweets allowed.
It lets you very easily reply in a way that ropes your own community into the conversation without cutting off the OP or appearing to plagiarize them.
So now I have "post to mastodon" on my weekday daily to do list, but it still feels like a chore.
Part of it is that I haven't built a ton of community here yet.
But part of it is also that I think the lack of this functionality makes that community-building process less intuitive and more difficult.
Gwen Snyder is uncivil
mvario