If Alice makes a followers-only post, and Bob replies to it, to whom should Bob's reply be visible?
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@mhoye so, as the conversation goes on, the audience gets smaller and smaller?
@evan Absolutely. People can still seek out threads of conversation, but the set of people automatically tagged in get narrowed quickly.
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@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)
@brooke I like how conversations happen when I make friends-only posts on Facebook.
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@evan Absolutely. People can still seek out threads of conversation, but the set of people automatically tagged in get narrowed quickly.
@mhoye that's a great way to shut down conversations.
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@brooke I like how conversations happen when I make friends-only posts on Facebook.
@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.
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@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)
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@mhoye that's a great way to shut down conversations.
@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.
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@evan if "mutuals only" were a visibility option, then I'd be okay with reconsidering "followers only" visibility.
@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….
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@maj does this help?
@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. -
@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.
@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.
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@mhoye that's a great way to shut down conversations.
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@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.@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.
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@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 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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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?
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@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. -
@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?
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@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
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(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
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@evan Hm. I chose "other" but now I think what I meant to select was
"both Alice's and Bob's followers"
