Like, if I send to "Hey does anybody have a place I can crash tonight?" to @group--attendees_of_this_hacker_gathering but invisible to @guy_I_dont_trust_to_be_alone_with_but_really_dont_want_to_get_into_a_public_confrontation_about_that_right_now,
is there a chance that @defender_of_that_guy_who_sees_fear_of_him_as_an_attack_on_his_character sees that block in the metadata of the post and starts flaming me about it?
This is a contrived example that I don't have specific experiences I'm translating it from,
and sometimes technical limitations or just "we don't have a better design for that yet" mean that you can't AVOID exposing that, so it's not necessarily "it Must Be Fixed if it reveals this",
just,
(a) finding what intuition might be, and checking the implemented teality against that
(b) exploring what attacks there might be, and knowing where they might be made less post-hoc surprising
e.g.:
https://old.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/18ebrhx/blocks_being_public_is_already_leading_to/
@gaditb@icosahedron.website
I think the Bluesky example you linked to is an unfortunate illustration of what happens when we expect technical tools to cleanly solve social problems. Making a blocklist public is obviously egregious, but even private exclusions can be exposed through old-fashioned social interactions. For example, someone casually referencing a post might unintentionally reveal to someone else that they weren't included.
In Bonfire, boundaries aren’t meant to control what others do on their own instance (apart from defining who an activity is addressed to, similarly to BCC with email). They’re more about controlling what reaches you on yours. Since ActivityPub doesn’t yet support strong security features like end-to-end encryption or object capabilities, boundaries are designed as a local-first mechanism. They help shape your experience and interactions rather than enforcing strict rules across the network.
So, in your example, if someone starts harassing you, you can block them, or just silence them or the thread in question. From your perspective, those replies disappear, and new ones won’t appear at all. Your instance silently enforces these boundaries by ignoring unwanted interactions, even if the sender’s server is unaware and still allows them to post.
It’s not perfect privacy or hard enforcement but harm reduction and local autonomy in a messy, federated world...
It's like having a decentralised blogging platform and feed reader integrated in your social network.
And yes, you can also write articles directly in Bonfire! While the authoring experience is still rough around the edges (we're actively improving the UX), we're pleased with this initial prototype (which includes a simple rich text editor using markdown, and the option to add a title and cover image). In fact, this very article was written and published through Bonfire.
