still fucking mystified why i cant limit posts to mutuals.

[miriamrobern@dice.camp]

still fucking mystified why i cant limit posts to mutuals. seems like the most obvious, low-hanging-fruit feature in the world.

#mastodon #activitypub

[julian@activitypub.space]

miriamrobern@dice.camp I have an answer for this that is rather technical in nature, as to why this isn't possible today.

... but sometimes people just want to express frustration and don't want to hear reasons, so let me know if you'd like to hear it.

[miriamrobern@dice.camp]

@julian thanls for checking, but i am curious!

[julian@activitypub.space]

miriamrobern@dice.camp the reason is two-fold:

1. There is no standardized way to communicate "mutuals" as a group between instances. Comparatively, there is one for "public".
2. You cannot easily tell whether your mutuals are the same as another server's list of mutuals, so there's a reliability guarantee that is hard to satisfy.

These are solvable problems, but sadly it isn't as low hanging as it initially seems 😅

[miriamrobern@dice.camp]

@julian ah thanks that helps!

[jdp23@neuromatch.social]

Yeah, it's frustrating -- people have been asking for this since forever (well 2018 but close enough .There are some interesting perspectives from Claire on the challenges of adding this to Mastodon in a Github discussion in https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/7135#issuecomment-636767048

@julian @miriamrobern