@reiver what does the conversation look like to Bob's followers who don't follow Alice? Or to people who don't follow either?

@evan I think it should be a per post setting to choose between "intersection" and "OP's followers".

@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.

@skobkin @evan why?
If Alice explicitly limited the visibility why could the reply need a broader range? Bob's subscribers won't see the original post anyway.

This would better be better applied to quotes: should Bob be able to open an Alice post to his followers with the quoting?

@skobkin as someone who posts a daily poll on the Fediverse, I am aware that different people have different opinions on a variety of topics. That's what polls are for.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. With that option, the number of people who can read replies gets smaller and smaller as the conversation goes on. It makes followers-only posts really hard to use.

@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.

@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.

@evan
Yes, that's exactly my point.

I try not to use such posts even if I want to because it would confuse people and I don't want them to see separate meaningless replies.

@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.

@rune

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.

@evan as Bob decides. Maybe even everyone

@skobkin Hmm.

They shouldn't see the OP. They should see the thread from the interaction.

Does it make any sense?
Promoting the idea to follow Alice?
@evan

@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.

@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.)

@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.

@evan

Ideally —

...

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).

...

For the latter —

Again, from a UX point of view — Placeholder posts, until they follow Alice or Bob.

.

@liilliil what does it look like to Bob's followers if he chooses his followers, or his and Alice's followers?

@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.

@evan ok

@skobkin Agreed.

don't show Bob's replies to Alice's thread to Bob's followers at all

That's what I've been talking about.

misleading for Bob

Okay, then this should be fixed somewhere (FEP?) to create a rule.
It doesn't seem misleading, it's just not documented correctly yet.
@evan