If Alice makes a followers-only post, and Bob replies to it, to whom should Bob's reply be visible?
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@evan The venn intersection of Alice and Bob's followers.
@mhoye so, as the conversation goes on, the audience gets smaller and smaller?
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@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.
@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)
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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)
@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!)
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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?
Dawn Ahukanna (@dahukanna@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image @evan@cosocial.ca It should be visible to the original set as Alice shared the post with her followers, not followers of followers (light blue segment of set diagram). Any of Bob’s followers that also follow Alice will see the post and replies anyway. See comments on set diagram and post about the set theory maths/model - https://mastodon.social/@dahukanna/116030140984675453
Mastodon (mastodon.social)
@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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@twobiscuits @evan
You can make posts that are only visible to those mentioned. -
@evan Alices followers only. I am tired of fragmented discussions
