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

[rowan@lgbtqia.space]

@LunaDragofelis @evan I think we have two different mental models about discussions on Mastodon (and social media more generally). And different people use different mental models, yet often assume everyone else sees things the way they do..
One model sees a “thread” or a “discussion” as belonging to the person who created the first note and sees subsequent reply notes linked to the thread as being part of Alice’s (the original note’s author) thread. The other model sees a thread as a collection of individual notes, linked together, with each reply note in the discussion belonging to the reply’s author.
In the model where Bob and Carol and Dawn and Eve are just replying to Alice’s thread, one might expect those reply Notes to go to whatever group of people Alice had originally sent her note to. In the model where each author owns their own notes, one would expect reply Notes to honor the audience specified in the reply Note itself.
The confusion is made worse because the audience settings mean different things in different circumstances, and none of the clients are yet showing what those audiences actually mean for any given Note.

[vanderwal@mastodon.social]

@evan It isn't intended as condescension. The common saying of "you can't know until you know" applies. Until you run across what you can unsee or unthink it isn't a possibility.

The Kathy Sierra debacle that was the final push that got Twitter to have their private accounts in the manner the put in place (as a stop gap) was a brutal wake-up call for many. The frailty of that system also was problematic and those, like Kathy, ended up leaving in the tens of thousands.

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@mdione yeah, keeping the audience pretty much the same as the conversation grows seems very natural to me, too.

[skobkin@gts.skobk.in]

@rayslava @evan
You read it like that because you're a developer, you know about things like ACL's, permission inheritance, et cetera, et cetera.

But I wouldn't expect that from an average end-user.

[vanderwal@mastodon.social]

@evan I was a little surprised by the flippant family doesn't complain, to be honest. ;-)

I am saying all of this to help. Please take it as that.

[lobsterofrevenge@mastodon.social]

@evan
Eve

[raymaccarthy@mastodon.ie]

@ZenHeathen @evan
Yes it should. It's Alice's conversation. Only Alice's followers if she marked it thus

Except Mastodon will show it to anyone mentioned by bob. Which is broken. Even if it was private to Alice and Bob.

[vanderwal@mastodon.social]

@evan Oh, I could have worded it a bit better. My sinuses are ripped up and hurting, which is not a great time to be at keyboard attached to a social platform.

[flippac@types.pl]

@evan those following both Alice and Bob

[flippac@types.pl]

@evan @panos there's a reason LJ-and-successor users had "my journal, my rules" as a saying though

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@vanderwal so, I think I see where we went askew here.

You said, "Most services get this wrong and make the replies visible to B's followers only."

I disagreed, "Most services get this *right* and make the replies visible to A's followers only."

I don't think we disagree about the right way to do it -- we disagree if services actually do it that way.

I am not sure why you think they don't. As far as I can tell, X, Instagram and Facebook all make replies visible to A's followers.

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@vanderwal I also agree that making B's responses visible to all of A's followers can be a problem.

Especially in families and friends groups, A might approve both B and C as followers, but B might not want anything to do with C. C might be an ex-lover or a racist uncle or whatever.

Unfortunately, when we sever connections, not all of our friends and family do, too.

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@vanderwal

Respecting blocks fixes this, obviously. But sometimes there are cases where B doesn't know C follows A, and hasn't blocked them.

I think giving B some options for replies -- reply privately to A, reply to same audience -- makes sense.

I don't think making replies visible to B's followers only is the answer, though.

[stephaniepixie@fandom.garden]

@mayintoronto @evan Yes, this! I know many people would love “mutuals only” posts. I would definitely use that more than “followers only”

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@flippac so, the conversation audience keeps getting smaller and smaller?

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@stephaniepixie @mayintoronto I think "followers only" only makes sense if you manually approve followers.

[vanderwal@mastodon.social]

@evan Twitter / X have public replies from B visible to A's followers as they are open. But, B's followers can see the response, which is where things get to be problematic.

I wasn't intending to say only B's followers saw the reply, but that they could see the response to a private account.

Marketers, stalkers, and worse have easy pickings in that model.

What @dahukanna lays out in the venn diagram is the good approach.

[flippac@types.pl]

@evan this is what happens when people want to have a moderately private conversation, yeah: think of it like the pub/bar/café table filling up for a given subthread

[stephaniepixie@fandom.garden]

@evan @mayintoronto I actually do manually approve but I’m not chatty with every single person who follows me. I don’t always follow back.

[vanderwal@mastodon.social]

@evan I’ve always leaned toward having A's wishes respected as a first order priority.

I've worked to help platforms work through options for B to respond in a manner (it was a two tiered response model) where the one to A is clear, but one that filters out A from the response (either as script to remove it, or giving B the option for a public version).

These options were never implimented.

I know Traction software (for enterprise and “secure" focussed organizations) did this really well.