If Alice makes a followers-only post, and Bob replies to it, to whom should Bob's reply be visible?

@evan (in general i'm a big fan of making "spaces" with clear scope and privacy rules that, once you're in them, you're in a little community.

on the small scale: people who can see a post and engage with replies to it

on the medium scale: private and public groups/forums with moderatable membership

on the large scale: instance-level communities

vs just stringing together a graph of connected individual posts)

@evan I would tend to say "Both", but I am saying Alice.

Mastodon (not ActivityPub) specifically lacks level of privacy "local". Therefore I use the "followers only" mode to run moderator's account, which confirm follow requests only to local accounts. I want this discussion restricted only to followers, but actually, I wouldn't mind, if I could restrict the privacy to "local users" (some other ActivityPub implementations allow this). But I guess some users in followers-only mode have the same need for privacy.

On the other hand, if there can be more privacy level, there would be very useful level of both status privacy level and reply allowance mode, which would be "people, who I follow only". This would effectively allow me to mix functionality of "anybody can follow" accounts with "confirmation of follow requests": simply, all people, who I follow, would be considered friends and would be considered my inner circle. No need for blocking - just unfollowing someone would remove them.

Adding privacy level "people, who I follow" privacy level besides existing "followers only" and using this also to determine who can reply, would make things much easier, at least for me.

I want to keep open follow policy, but there are certain topics, which I don't really want to discuss openly with general public. But the fact, that I follow someone, usually means, that there are some common interests. If they don't follow me back - well, it is their fault, who cares. Technically, I see zero implementation difference if I compare "who I follow" to "who follows me". These two are very similar SQL queries. But it would be "5th level of privacy" (local users are 6th level).

But there can be different privacy preferences and maybe, some people may like to use lists also as "target groups" (called Circles on Googe Plus)... but this would be probably very hard to implement in federated environment.

@evan (this is something i'd love to bring to wikis/mediawiki/wikipedia too, but i don't have the time or headspace to deal with that and it would really need more community-management input than i could provide alone. something to think about down the road!)

@evan Absolutely. People can still seek out threads of conversation, but the set of people automatically tagged in get narrowed quickly.

@brooke I like how conversations happen when I make friends-only posts on Facebook.

@mhoye that's a great way to shut down conversations.

@evan yeah my experience in FB with friends-only posts is pretty great. my friends can post in my replies and see each other even if they're not friends themselves, and I believe I can nuke individual replies if I feel they're disruptive.

@evan (though there are threat models to think about, like 'is one of alice's friends bob's stalker and they might see bob's reply and glean information from it?', which you just kind of have to bake in to the world-weary hellhole that is planet earth)

@evan I think the default presumption that everyone is welcome to become part of any conversation is only that: an unconsidered default assumption inherited from Twitter and specifically from early Twitter's growth-at-any-cost corporate goals. At the very least we should be considering counterbalancing options.

@mayintoronto @evan Friendica has a system that allows you to define lists comparable to reading lists for posts (or custom-add viewers to posts as you go) - that would resolve this whole situation, and allow people to have more contextual human-shaped discussions (like taking discussion in which you’re trying to find common ground with someone outside your political sphere to the kitchen at a party rather than having your most strident friends come to chew them out for not being already correct, or being able to plan the surprise party or tabletop twist without the whole world and the targets of said surprise hearing about it.) I really want it to get some renewed developmental interest for that reason - mastodon, akin to twitter before it, is sort of a public broadcasting system….

@evan EXACTLY what I imagined.
So, the answer would be visible to the intersect between them.
Of course, how that scales as *those* people reply... there lies the rub.

@mhoye it's not about everyone having access to every conversation. When I make a friend's-only post on Instagram or Facebook, I expect my friends and family to be able to talk to each other. These conversations are really precious and intimate to me. I would hate to have them attenuate to nothing because no one could see each other's replies.

@evan @mhoye If someone goes followers-only, I think we can assume they're here to talk to their friends and nobody else.

I feel like I'm violating their trust if my replies leak out of their containment. Especially when that could potentially drive harassment.

@maj Dawn's and my answer would be all of Alice's followers. I don't like the intersection answer, because it gets smaller and smaller over time. I think Alice's intent is to have her friends and family have a conversation, like it works on Instagram and Facebook.

@evan In that context, I would expect that the venn overlap I'm describing would be quite large, but it certainly seems like something we could actually measure and experiment with if it were presented as an option.

@flyingsquirrel @evan I think this is a fair assessment. If the default setting - particularly for somebody with a large number of followers - is that a reply causes a friends-only post to immediately break containment, that makes any reply from anyone who does numbers on here an act of bad faith, intended or not.

@flyingsquirrel @evan Possibly worse: I've got almost 6k followers on here, because I guess I bring some funny now and then.

But if I have a vulnerable friend On Here, who maybe feels safe with a small number of curated mutuals and posts something friends only, and my reply brings _six thousand randos_ into the mix? Then I ... can't be that person's friend anymore; not on here at least, not responsibly. I can't talk to them at all.

@evan @maj I voted for the broader answer, but I have to admit they the intersectional approach is closer to what happens in real life.

@evan But mastodon posts are visible to the public, without a login. Is there anywhere that isn't the case? Everyone who wants to can see all the posts, no?

@twobiscuits @evan
You can make posts that are only visible to those mentioned.