# Is there a way to quote something that was said on a different Discourse instance? **URL:** \ **Category:** Site feedback\ **Created:** [13 באוגוסט,‏ 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:** 1\ **Showing post:** 2
**Author:** ![almereyda](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/almereyda/32/367792_2.png) [@almereyda](https://meta.discourse.org/u/almereyda)\ **Post date:** [13 באוגוסט,‏ 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. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-there-a-way-to-quote-something-that-was-said-on-a-different-discourse-instance/18815)._