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 this is really hard. But thankfully I've been trying to train myself to think about potentials for abuse.
Showing the comment to just Bob's followers creates the risk that Bob and followers will create an echo chamber opposed to Alice's original sentiment, and worse towards Alice herself. That's bad, and reminds of cliquish negativity that you find in adolescent groups and office environments.
Showing the comment to just Alice's followers raises a different risk. What if Bob's comment is a good faith critique, but runs against the conventional wisdom within the majority of Alice's followers? Will Bob be potentially drummed out of Alice's circle? This is regardless of the relative merits of the argument.
The outcome would deprive Alice's followers and Alice of a potentially interesting viewpoint. Not to mention the potential for hard feelings.
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@rune the question is about the correct answer.
@evan there isn't any protocol to communicate consent with all parties, so it just has to be a broken mess.
Even if Bob gets a return list of Alices followers and allows those the thread is still broken for all of Bobs followers who are not in Alice's list. Even if you had reply controls for Alice to approve Bobs reply it would have to retroactively apply to all of Alice's posts to be useful to Bobs followers. And beyond just retroactively applying this change it'd be a mess to communicate that this was happening in the UI. And we didn't even wonder what happens with a 3rd participant yet.
I think the concept is mostly just flawed and the best we can do is mostly broken threads and a working implementation for the people who are in the subset of all followers lists.
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@evan
I’m surprised at the results here. To me it seems like a cut-and-dry consent issue: Alice has indicated in the original post that she only consents to communicating with people who follow her on that post. By making Bob’s replies visible to Bob’s followers (or anyone else) you’re exposing Alice to accounts she did explicitly did not consent to communicating with. 🤨 -
@panos well, ActivityPub lets anyone address anyone else on the Fediverse. You can even address collections of people, like my following list or someone else's contacts collection. The choices that are allowed in the Mastodon interface are a small subset of who you could actually address with ActivityPub.
@evan@cosocial.ca it's worse than I thought then
I think there probably should have been a distinction between who you can address in the discussions you start, compared to the discussions someone else starts. It's a privacy issue. Say for example that for some reason I don't want everyone to know I am online and posting, so I restrict the visibility of my posts. Then someone else can see one of my followers replying to me (since including the handle in the replies also practically reveals who you are replying to).
Say for example I am asking my friends on fedi what to do about someone who harasses me. And someone replies to my post with advice about harassment. The person who harasses me could very well understand what I'm talking about.
It is what it is, of course, just saying, I think this particular aspect is not optimal behaviour for social media. -
@evan if "mutuals only" were a visibility option, then I'd be okay with reconsidering "followers only" visibility.
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@evan Given all the complexities and real and potential vectors of abuse, maybe replies to followers-only posts should be forced to be private mentions?
Sometimes people share personal things using followers-only visibility, and replying directly without exposing private details seems the most appropriate.
Eg. not announcing "Hope you'll recover from the diarrhea soon, Bob!" to potentially thousands of strangers, or even people who do know Bob, but Bob was not addressing in his post.
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@luana what if there was a clear label on who it was going to? "Same audience" or something similar?
@evan As an extra option which happens to become the default and has a different name in the API? Sure. As a substitute to the current options? Definitely not.
Not only this would be misleading if one is using a 3rd party client that didn’t update all the strings for all languages yet, risking leaking sensitive information, but also the current behaviour is ideal for some kind of discussions about topics one might consider more private and wouldn’t want to share with unapproved people.
In addition to this new “same audience” option, it’d be interesting to have extra privacy options for regular toots too such as “mutuals only” (already present in some fediverse software), “followers except <these users/users on this list>” and “only <these users/users on this list>”
But definitely don’t change the behaviour on the same option/api endpoint assuming everyone would see the “same audience” label change. Add that as an extra, separate option, that clients would need to add support for instead of leaking sensitive information automatically from a server update.
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@silvermoon82 what does the conversation look like to those of Bob's followers who don't follow Alice?
@evan
I think subsequent replies should CC both Bob's and Alice's followers, so those who follow Bob but not Alice would still be able to see all subsequent replies. -
@evan there isn't any protocol to communicate consent with all parties, so it just has to be a broken mess.
Even if Bob gets a return list of Alices followers and allows those the thread is still broken for all of Bobs followers who are not in Alice's list. Even if you had reply controls for Alice to approve Bobs reply it would have to retroactively apply to all of Alice's posts to be useful to Bobs followers. And beyond just retroactively applying this change it'd be a mess to communicate that this was happening in the UI. And we didn't even wonder what happens with a 3rd participant yet.
I think the concept is mostly just flawed and the best we can do is mostly broken threads and a working implementation for the people who are in the subset of all followers lists.
Bob can send his reply to Alice's followers.
Anybody can send anybody anything on the Fediverse. You don't have to read it, but they can send it.
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@evan
I think subsequent replies should CC both Bob's and Alice's followers, so those who follow Bob but not Alice would still be able to see all subsequent replies.@evan
If we take the further step of a Collection of thread participants/followers, then Bob-only followers should be able to backfill the conversation and see the full thread. -
Showing the comment to just Alice's followers raises a different risk. What if Bob's comment is a good faith critique, but runs against the conventional wisdom within the majority of Alice's followers? Will Bob be potentially drummed out of Alice's circle? This is regardless of the relative merits of the argument.
The outcome would deprive Alice's followers and Alice of a potentially interesting viewpoint. Not to mention the potential for hard feelings.
@evan but Alice wanted her followers and only her followers to see the original post, right? So is it an invasion of the public circle that comprises those followers to spread out further via Bob's reply? Note that I'm very carefully avoiding the word "private". These are limited public spaces.
The only conclusion I can reach is that the ability to post to followers only, since anybody can follow anybody, blocks excepted, is to impose a sort of embargo on what is still a public expression.
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@evan@cosocial.ca it's worse than I thought then
I think there probably should have been a distinction between who you can address in the discussions you start, compared to the discussions someone else starts. It's a privacy issue. Say for example that for some reason I don't want everyone to know I am online and posting, so I restrict the visibility of my posts. Then someone else can see one of my followers replying to me (since including the handle in the replies also practically reveals who you are replying to).
Say for example I am asking my friends on fedi what to do about someone who harasses me. And someone replies to my post with advice about harassment. The person who harasses me could very well understand what I'm talking about.
It is what it is, of course, just saying, I think this particular aspect is not optimal behaviour for social media.@panos oh, yeah, it's terribly dangerous and rude. It's a good idea for Fediverse software to hide or disable that option. But the protocol allows it. (So does email. You can add in other people or even a mailing list to a private email conversation at any time.)
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@evan If Alice purposefully publishes a followers-only post she must have good reason for it, hence the whole thread should be treated with delicacy, i.e. extending the visibility of the thread (or part of it like Bob's reply!) to people not following Alice is a no-go IMO.
Bob is free to do a post of his own that is not a reply to a more privacy-minded person's.
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@reiver what does the conversation look like to Bob's followers who don't follow Alice? Or to people who don't follow either?
Ideally —
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For the former —
From a UX point of view, they (Bob's followers who don't yet follow Alice) could see a placeholder post for Alice's post(s), that says that the content cannot be shown.
If a follower of Bob's then followed Alice, then the placeholder post(s) would turn into the actual post(s).
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For the latter —
Again, from a UX point of view — Placeholder posts, until they follow Alice or Bob.
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@liilliil what does it look like to Bob's followers if he chooses his followers, or his and Alice's followers?
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@adam so, in a conversation with Charlene, David, Evan and Frances, there would just be a smaller and smaller circle of people who could follow along? That seems best to you?
@evan I think so. The wishes of any of the participants to keep the message to followers only is not respected if both presence of the conversation and parts of it are visible to followers' followers.
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Bob can send his reply to Alice's followers.
Anybody can send anybody anything on the Fediverse. You don't have to read it, but they can send it.
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@evan Given all the complexities and real and potential vectors of abuse, maybe replies to followers-only posts should be forced to be private mentions?
Sometimes people share personal things using followers-only visibility, and replying directly without exposing private details seems the most appropriate.
Eg. not announcing "Hope you'll recover from the diarrhea soon, Bob!" to potentially thousands of strangers, or even people who do know Bob, but Bob was not addressing in his post.
@evan Maybe it would be better to rephrase this question as: If you post a followers-only post, who do you expect to get replies from?
I'm getting the sense that some people are more interested in getting into other people's business than respecting boundaries. Hence the strong opposition to reply controls.
"But what about my right to share my unwanted opinion" vs respecting how other people want to interact online.
