Mastodon is the United States of the Fediverse

While I love the concept of interaction controls, I think quotes should be exempt. Why? Because the stated reasons for restricting them are based on problems from commercial social media that do not exist on fedi. Limiting quotes won't measurably improve user safety, but will bring several notable downsides.

For example, dunking is only so much of a problem because commercial moderators ignore it. As long as the quote itself doesn't contain any overt harassment, the quoter can evade punishment for all the indirect harm. On fedi, however, we don't have to follow those standards. I'm not scared to take action against large accounts; in fact I quite enjoy suspending popular assholes. As long as we don't let growth-chasing lead our moderation principles, we can protect against quote-dunking like any other form of group harassment - by suspending those who engage in it, and the instances that enable them.

This same principle applies to most other forms of quote-based harassment. The idea that users are helpless against quotes without protocol-level protection implies that moderators are useless or even hostile. This is a fair assumption when looking at commercial platforms, but I'd like to think fedi is different. Compared with other social networks, we have the highest moderator density, the most diverse moderation teams, and the unique quality of having moderators who are part of their own communities. We don't need to mimic Twitter or BlueSky, because our situation isn't remotely comparable.

On the flip side, our implementation of quote post provides several positive social benefits:
1. Changing the context - Sometimes a post is relevant, but not in the author's intended context. Starting a tangential discussion in replies can be annoying and frustrating to the author and any mentioned users who don't care about the tangent. Quotes are perfect as they start a brand new thread, and the author is only notified once instead of on each following reply.
2. Challenging misinformation - This can of course be done as a reply, but like I said before - I support the addition of Reply Controls across fedi. This would allow a scammer or other adversarial user to simply disable replies, preventing anyone from challenging their misinformation. This is already common on YouTube and TikTok, where misinformation runs rampant and is difficult to counter. Quote posts - if excluded from interaction controls - allow a safe avenue for any user to warn their followers about an untruthful post.
3. Boosting with CWs or commentary - Currently, this is what most of my quote posts are. I frequently "add a CW" by making a quote post with a content warning and empty body. Sometimes I add notes, especially if I don't want to fully endorse the post. The alternative to quotes is posting a link or screenshot, which is worse for various reasons that have already been well-discussed.

TL;DR - Fedi isn't Twitter, it's not necessary to restrict quotes, and quote-posts are actually positive.