# Is there a way to quote something that was said on a different Discourse instance?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815
**Category:** Site feedback
**Created:** [August 13, 2014, 3:48pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815 "2014-08-13T15:48:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 12
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@DoctorJones](https://meta.discourse.org/u/DoctorJones)
#### Post date: [August 13, 2014, 3:48pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815/1 "2014-08-13T15:48:11Z")
Is there a way to quote something that was said on a different Discourse instance? I’m guessing no, but thought I’d ask.
I know I can manually quote it, but I’d like Discourse to add the link arrows and have the expand functionality that it present in non manual quotes.
I’ve tried searching but there’s a lot of noise when you search for anything involving quotes.
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### Author:  [@almereyda](https://meta.discourse.org/u/almereyda)
#### Post date: [August 13, 2014, 4:45pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815/2 "2014-08-13T16:45:15Z")
Discourse being an Open Source application itself and dedicated to Open Standards, it theoretically build on already existing interface specifications, that try to federate conversations accross platforms.
The two leading initiatives in this directions are the
- [W3C Social Web](https://github.com/e14n/pump.io/issues/1#issuecomment-45083815) Working Group and Interest Group and the
- [IndieWeb Movement](http://indiewebcamp.com/) with their approaches of POSSE, PESOS, leveraging Webmentions and so fort, plus even [IndieAuth](https://twitter.com/brennannovak/status/481411357279911938).
As federation is not trivial, I know it from experiments with the [Federated Wiki](http://fed.wiki.org), initiatives like the above will help to find common consensus on how to model distributed conversation graphs. This will likely also include ideas coming from the Open Annotation working group that also works on [Hypothes.is](http://hypothes.is).
Further more, as I am interested in aesthetically designing these distributed/federated conversations, the same question [has already been raised earlier](https://meta.discourse.org/t/federation-of-article-links-between-discourse-instances/11260) and could even be used to some weird scenarios as [_merging_ two Discourse instances](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-it-possible-to-merge-two-discourse-instances-into-one/16313), now that I think of it.
The important part here is to get the content of one site to the other, with possibilities of **Forking** and **Re-Merging** , i.e. Pull Requests known from Git(Hub).
One of the noisy results when searching for quotes that I provided delivers [another small piece of the puzzle](https://meta.discourse.org/t/make-quote-reply-for-several-posts-in-a-thread-more-obvious/14646). In the end, the user’s interface itself should _facilitate_ the creation, visualization and maintenance of distributed conversations. This is a task not to be solved by Discourse alone, as mentionned earlier.
But _it can_ help with that, as its name implies [sociological reasoning about the underlying principles](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discoursive-principles-for-discourse-2-0/16247), regulated algorithmically by its codebase.
Just my € 0,02.
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [August 13, 2014, 9:17pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815/3 "2014-08-13T21:17:14Z")
No there is no support for this but sounds like an interesting power user feature, possibly an extension of one boxing a post
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### Author:  [@DoctorJones](https://meta.discourse.org/u/DoctorJones)
#### Post date: [August 13, 2014, 9:51pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815/4 "2014-08-13T21:51:34Z")
Thanks for the reply Sam. I thought this would probably be the case, but thought I’d seen something like this being used before. I must have been getting confused with one boxing.
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### Author:  [@Alankrit\_Choudh](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Alankrit_Choudh)
#### Post date: [August 13, 2014, 9:53pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815/5 "2014-08-13T21:53:53Z")
[https://greedgamer.com/t/what-game-are-u-playing-now/29/5](https://greedgamer.com/t/what-game-are-u-playing-now/29/5)
Some Thing like this ?
That is the 5th post
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### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [August 13, 2014, 10:02pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815/6 "2014-08-13T22:02:48Z")
… but on steroids, allows you to select the section quoted as well.
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### Author:  [@almereyda](https://meta.discourse.org/u/almereyda)
#### Post date: [August 15, 2014, 12:56pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815/7 "2014-08-15T12:56:04Z")
@sam, would you mind webmentionning the domains that Discourse oneboxes from? Maybe just a small, little addition with huge federation chances.
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [August 15, 2014, 7:23pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815/8 "2014-08-15T19:23:25Z")
I don’t know what this means. The default whitelist is in the public open source code, visible to everyone.
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### Author:  [@almereyda](https://meta.discourse.org/u/almereyda)
#### Post date: [September 22, 2014, 2:44am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815/9 "2014-09-22T02:44:32Z")
To reformulate, my question was:
- Can you as the Discourse maintainers imagine to support IndieWeb’s [Webmention](http://webmention.io/) protocol to notify external sites (Loomio discussions? Blogs?) of links pointing at them.
The conversation graph, as currently shown by in- and outbound links to a topic, could then possibly traverse domains.
I’m taking inspiration here from what Discourse does already, plus GitHub’s style of adding references to a conversation.
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### Author:  [@riking](https://meta.discourse.org/u/riking)
#### Post date: [September 22, 2014, 2:57am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815/10 "2014-09-22T02:57:34Z")
> [@almereyda](#):
>
> Can you as the Discourse maintainers imagine to support IndieWeb’s Webmention protocol to notify external sites (Loomio discussions? Blogs?) of links pointing at them.
That sounds very, very much like `POST /trackback` to me. Which, by the way, is something spammed to every single webserver in existence.
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [September 22, 2014, 3:00am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815/11 "2014-09-22T03:00:50Z")
See also
> **[The Day The Trackbacks Died](https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-day-the-trackbacks-died/)**
>
> You might read a post on this blog and decide I’m full of crap. That’s fine. I often am full of crap. I encourage you to leave a comment explaining why you feel this way. And, while you’re at it, feel free to point out any errors
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### Author:  [@almereyda](https://meta.discourse.org/u/almereyda)
#### Post date: [September 15, 2015, 9:55pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815/12 "2015-09-15T21:55:33Z")
With
> **[Vouch](https://indieweb.org/vouch)**
>
> The Vouch protocol is an anti-spam extension to Webmention that can also be used to customize how your site accepts responses from different audiences.
in place, can we imagine trusted, in this case vouched, Discourse federations and/or multisites with distributed conversations takeing place?
[http://twitter.com/brennannovak/status/481411357279911938](http://twitter.com/brennannovak/status/481411357279911938)
Btw., to the mods @codinghorror and @sam, I just wanted to revisit the
> [@almereyda](#):
>
> its name implies **sociological reasoning about the underlying principles** , regulated algorithmically by its codebase.
and don’t have access to said topic anymore. Do you know why?