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

@stephaniepixie @mayintoronto @evan followers only mostly acts as a "can't be boosted" technique imo. the audience limitation is secondary.

side note: why are boost controls and audience controls the same thing! bothers me to no end

@flippac it's not how most other social networks work. If Alice posted a private photo on Instagram, and Bob commented, Alice's other followers could see Bob's comment, but Bob's followers could not.

@evan@cosocial.ca if Bob is malicious, he could simply screenshot Alice's post and share it with his followers.

With that in mind, it seems reasonable for his reply to be sent to his followers, with an off-by-default checkbox to also forward Alice's message to his followers.

People who don't follow Bob probably shouldn't see Bob's reply. But if Alice appreciates it, she could have an option to forward it to her followers (except any who have blocked Bob). Or maybe if she gives it a / (and it's a non-private message) then it's automatically sent to her followers?

It would also make sense for Charlie to have a profile-wide option to not see replies to posts that he can't see. Even if I'm interested in Bob, I don't need to see his reply to an invisible post by Alice.

I realise that has some uncomfortable implications, but as you describe, all of the options seem to. That's what makes it a tough question 

@evan yeah, but we actually have an opportunity to have at least one mode work that way whereas the current effect of "followers only" is for everybody to have to ask themselves if someone is following them who shouldn't be party to the conversation

@evan ("private" here being the DM analogue, ofc)

@stephaniepixie @mayintoronto @evan
Yes! Mutuals Only would be a great feature. I don't think it's possible to express in current ActivityPub, but that could be solved by introducing a Mutuals Collection, or set arithmetic for existing Collections (to: (Followers AND Follows)).

@evan I chose Alice's followers on the understanding that "should" means "what I would expect to happen as a user and how I would want to strive to make it work as an implementor, even though I think that's not now it works now"

This is on the basis that I believe the replies to a standalone post belong "in the space" of that user's posts, and so they should "live" on their instance, and they should have ability to moderate within that space.

@inherentlee @mayintoronto @evan Yes, I mainly only use “followers only so it can’t be boosted”.
It never occurred to me to think of boost control as a potentially separate thing. That would be a good feature even in public posts.

@evan xitter not working that way was also the source of some easy social faux pas if you so much as forgot that one of the people in a thread had their account locked while you were looking at an individual post (in which case in practice you should stay out of it)

@evan The venn intersection of Alice and Bob's followers.

@mhoye so, as the conversation goes on, the audience gets smaller and smaller?

@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.