Discussion

If you search out @chat@pelago.1sland.social (ie., @chat) and click through to its profile page in your fediverse software (Mastodon, etc) you'll see the profile pictured here, but what you won't see is any of the posts below.

They are all Followers-Only. You need to be a follower first to see the posts below (and to reply and take part in the conversation).

Once you make your follow request within a minute or so and the profile confirms you are following them, you should see the posts below show up 'like magic', as your instance backfills the 'followers only' content (and grants your user access to it).

The content is on your server, but most fediverse software will prevent Followers Only content from being displayed on the web, externally linked, searchable or shareable by anyone except followers.

Where followers only breaks (as everyone here probably knows already) is that as soon as you reply to a followers-only post, you're bringing your followers into it.

The fix, ultimately, is just to rebroadcast, with everything owned by the group. That way, the replies all stay within the same group of followers.

That's why when you reply to a post from a Pelago group you should switch the audience from 'followers only' to 'private mention', to ensure that only the network sees your reply.

D. Olifant

@oli@olifant.social · 2 hours ago

I'm not saying I'm the first person to come up with this idea, I'm just the first person I'm aware of that's doing it.

Because so much of 'groups' is about sharing things publicly and publicly in the sense of can be scraped by the web, and I'm more interested in allowlisting behavior, opt-in, rather than opt-out.

If you can share something with a group, normally you can also share it on the web or link to it directly.

Not so here. Linking to it directly takes you to a Pelago link to the discussion, which not only requires you to be logged in with your fediverse handle, but also to be following the group (which you can do directly in Pelago if you want) to access the discussions page.

It's a 1:1 mapping on keeping conversations private across both boundaries, both natively in Pelago or on the fediverse.

Experiments with mentions made me realize that this also has to disable mentions, because anything that mentions you stays with you, even after you're removed as a follower.

So there's no mentions here, by design, just the one mention to the group.

D. Olifant

@oli@olifant.social · 2 hours ago

"Great, so something rebroadcasts my post. what if I edit the post?"

The edit gets pushed out and updated in your post, same same.

"What if I delete the post, then? My DM that I created to reply, what if I delete that?"

Then....it gets deleted from the group, too. :)

D. Olifant

@oli@olifant.social · 51 minutes ago

D. Olifant

@oli@olifant.social · 23 minutes ago

This is primarily focused on creating a private albeit not E2EE solution at this point. This isn't about your data being inaccessible or encrypted, it's about sharing it through a series of decentralized gates that are, themselves, probably coded to honor followers-only behavior (and softwares that aren't can eventually be blocked if it comes to that).

Like obviously there's the possibility for a malicious follower of a group to be running software that makes all followers-only posts public and sends them out as email updates or whatever they want, really.

But the majority case is for Mastodon, GoToSocial, etc, instances, that have developed a 'Followers Only' vocabulary and application semantics around it that reflect the intended audience, and gate display/access of that content, hiding it from the web (after all, it can't be 'followers only' if the whole freaking web can see it), and also both backfilling content when someone becomes a follower, but also redacting content when they unfollow.

That shit has been working for a long time and what I find amusing is that all my quests for privacy and discussions about the RSS feeds and preference for GTS which keeps my posts off the web and requires ActivityPub (and authorized fetch) to access, there's always been someone who says:

What you want is called "Followers Only".

Well, you know what? You're fuckin' right. You can't use private mentions, after all.

You need an explicit list of targets for a private mention.

But for 'followers only' addressing you don't need any of that. You just need to know who the GROUP is (@chat in this case) and tell any instance 'Hey, take this post or this update or this poll and send it to all my followers'.

So like, Pelago knows there's 11 people following chat right now, and knows their instances. So it just dedupes, maybe there's 8 instances total, and it just fans out to those 8 instances and says 'hey, here's a post for followers of @chat on here.'.

And your instance certainly knows if you follow @chat or not.

But if you capture that over the wire, you just see a post, sure, but you don't see the actual list of followers. That's kept on the instance itself.

And sharing the followers of a group is turned OFF by default. That's more of that privacy-first focus of the entire Pelago application.

That said, if you know of any existing software that sucks balls at keeping followers only secret (certain versions of Pixelfed come to mind) let me know and I can guard against that.

Lydia Conwell :mastodon:

@lydiaconwell@todon.nl · 2 hours ago

@oli "I'm not saying I'm the first person to come up with this idea"

You are, you know.

D. Olifant

@oli@olifant.social · 2 hours ago

@lydiaconwell I was pretty excited when I figured it all out. Like I'd unlocked a cheat code no one necessarily intended when they built the feature in the first place.

What about federation across instances?

What about moderation?