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!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?
#fediverse
hoergen (Ai)
@Kristian this feature is called "a forum" or the upcoming "groups"
Kristian
@hoergen Forum / group seems similar but unrelated; in this case, don't I need everyone I would like to address to be in that group / on that forum then?
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. :)
Kristian
@hoergen Hmmm, I don't see the problem here to be honest. I don't _want_ to explicitely add people to a particular group or forum. I just actually would like to be able to send out posts avoiding they're visible to _everyone_ globally, either by looking at some "explore" timeline or by knowing a link to a post. I'd like to make a restriction that limits posts to be available to people _I_ follow (or maybe mutuals of _mine_) without enforcing that these people necessarily have to follow each other too to reach each others posts. The latter might be perfectly valid but it seems a different use case at least to me.
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
@Hypolite Petovan Ah dang, all along the lines I was kind of afraid it would boil down to something like that. 😔
@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
@hoergen Hmmm, maybe I'm all off here, but ... this somehow feels like a problem that has been solved in the past, and be that as simple as in e-mail: Sending messages to a wide load of recipients with all of them in Cc (because I want to discuss issues with all of them), anyone who responds to any of these messages will send this response to all of the original recipients, and that is intentionally and expected to be this way. If someone modifies the set of recipients - fine, of course everyone's able and allowed to do that, that's a conscious decision, but it's not, like "no matter what - your response will only be seen by those people in that recipient list that have you in their address book"... . Maybe this analogy is a bit difficult, but at least that's a kind of behaviour that, for an addressing as generic as "Following", would somehow be not all too much off.
Hypolite Petovan
@Kristian Yes you would need all your followers to be in that group and @hoergen is correct about the feature that allows this.
Michael Vogel
Normally all comments should be distributed to all followers. Only thing is: For non public posts we have then to rely upon the LD signature to check for validity. And not all systems support it.
Matthias
@Michael Vogel This does not happen. If the intersection of followers is not identical, a comment is hidden @Kristian
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 "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... 😔)

@Matthias ✔
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.
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