!Friendica Support or maybe more general #Fediverse crowd: Given some communication over here recently, I wonder whether it's possible to compose posts that are visible to followers only but for which _each_ of my follower is able to see each response and able to interact with each other person responding there no matter whether these people follow each other too?
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hoergen (Ai)
•Kristian
•hoergen (Ai)
•@Kristian yes everybody has to be in that forum or group. That what you are trying is something like a "private public post Chimera".
You can do that if you have every other node in the fediverse under your personal control. Since this might a little bit difficult and guides to some serious discussion potential besides the node owners (and users) you should maybe rethink the reasons why you want to do that.
The more polite way of "grouping" people is to ask/invite them to join a group/forum by their own free will. There might be a chance that some of the people are not happy to be put in a half-public "Opt Out" selection by some strangers. ๐
Kristian
•Hypolite Petovan
•@Kristian @hoergen The short answer is: it's possible with the Diaspora protocol, not with the ActivityPub protocol. I wrote about it a while ago and this was confirmed to me: https://friendica.mrpetovan.com/display/735a2029-1763-824d-ccf4-070223721045
@Kristian @hoergen The short answer is: it's possible with the Diaspora protocol, not with the ActivityPub protocol. I wrote about it a while ago and this was confirmed to me: https://friendica.mrpetovan.com/display/735a2029-1763-824d-ccf4-070223721045
Hypolite Petovan
2022-11-26 17:33:01
Kristian
•@hoergen
hoergen (Ai)
•@Kristian look, if you want all the contacts just to be able to answer each other or see each others answers, you have to tell every server and other user who is allowed and should see the answer of every other participant.
So you have to technically group and share this "virtual group with all participants" to everybody else in the group. Otherwise nobody knows who to send replies, except to you.
Even this might be possible in other protocols, you have to trust every other involved node, that it respects your intention to privacy and keep the closed list that you set initially.
Kristian
•Hypolite Petovan
•Michael Vogel
•Matthias
•Michael Vogel
•I did some testing and now know, why this is the case. And I don't know, how to easily change this, without compromising security.
We have the three accounts A, B and C. B and C are following A, but B isn't following C. Now C is writing a comment. This comment is distributed to C's followers, which include A, but not B. Now A is relaying the comment to all of their followers, which includes B. But B will not process this message, since B isn't in the list of C's followers. It would be a security issue, to accept the post for B, since C could have decided to deliberately exclude B from this comment.
Kristian
•@Michael Vogel Don't we have a way, in the protocol, to figure out whether this has happened - like, C explicitely excluded B from receiving that post?
In a way, this feels like quite a hefty limitation in many ways. Wouldn't, by then, it be better to at least avoid "responses to responses" being sent out to people who aren't allowed to see previous responses and, this way, avoid these gaps in threads (and also avoid potentially leakage of information as even if you're unable to see a response because you're not following that particular person or they explicitely excluded you, you might get a clue on what the response was by reading the follow-ups...)? That doesn't really solve the problem but at least would make the behaviour a bit more predictable... .
(Or, the other question, then again getting back to what @hoergen stated above - handling "follower
... show more@Michael Vogel Don't we have a way, in the protocol, to figure out whether this has happened - like, C explicitely excluded B from receiving that post?
In a way, this feels like quite a hefty limitation in many ways. Wouldn't, by then, it be better to at least avoid "responses to responses" being sent out to people who aren't allowed to see previous responses and, this way, avoid these gaps in threads (and also avoid potentially leakage of information as even if you're unable to see a response because you're not following that particular person or they explicitely excluded you, you might get a clue on what the response was by reading the follow-ups...)? That doesn't really solve the problem but at least would make the behaviour a bit more predictable... .
(Or, the other question, then again getting back to what @hoergen stated above - handling "followers" as a virtual group / forum / whatever the name is, which feels fishy in some ways but might solve the problem if it happens transparently. After all, I don't want to explicitely "send messages to random persons", I just want to make sure there's a sane interaction for the crowd of people I'd like to address... ๐)
@Matthias โ
Michael Vogel
•I might have got a solution that I will try out in the next days. It is following the protocol, but would require some changes to both sides:
In the case that I described above, currently C is writing a post that is directed to the followers collection of C. We could extend this, so that the post is also directed to the followers collection of A. Since C can't know all followers of A, that task had then to be done by A. A then relays the comment to their followers (something that we already do). Then when B receives the post, the system will see two followers collections as receivers. B isn't in C's collection, but is in A's, so the post will be distributed to B as well.
I have to test, if this really works. Also I want to have a look if Mastodon, Pleroma or Misskey has got different solutions to that problem.