Hey, everyone. Thanks for the responses.
I am a Yes. I think a lot of people on the Fediverse think that this is what "public" posting means: people like us. You and me and everyone we know.
@evan I don't understand how this would make anything better.
I post to "friends of friends". The people who follow my followers see it, but not the people who follow them:
me -> sep1 -> sep2 X sep3
Someone in sep2 replies to my post as "friends of friends".
me: can see my post and the reply
sep1: can see my post and the reply
sep2: can see my post and the reply
sep3 (follows sep2): can see the reply
sep4 (follows sep3): can see the reply
Now say sep3 replies to sep2's post as "friends of friends".
me: can see my post, sep2's reply, but not sep3's reply.
sep1: can see all three posts
sep2: can see all three posts
sep3: can see all three posts
sep4: can see all three posts
sep5 (follower of sep4): can see only sep3's reply
All this does is further fragment the visibility of content in discussion threads that eventually end up public.
Before we start getting into questions like this, how about we establish whether you're assuming reply control is a thing - whether visibility of replies can be limited to visibility of initial post by the OP.
If the answer is no, then all this does is further fragment already confusing public threads.
If the answer is yes, then this is effectively establishing group private message threads where by definition some members either don't know or don't like each other.
I don't like either option.
@Robotistry I think replies should always by default have the same audience as the original post.
@Robotistry also, I don't think this is better; but I think that if people want this level of distribution, it's better to give them the option.
@evan But you didn't define a "level of distribution" in the poll.
If you don't include your assumptions, and you have no information on what assumptions the respondents were making, you haven't defined the "it" that people want or don't want.
If you are making assumptions that are directly contrary to an existing default paradigm (e.g. OP control of reply posts in threads vs. individual control of posts), you can't trust that the respondents interpreted the question the way you intended.
Having worked through it, I know I don't want it under any assumptions.
But you have no way of knowing whether your respondents have done that or whether they just clicked on the basis of "that sounds cool/terrible".
I hope you're not using polls like this to justify pushing for feature changes. They don't generate information about whether "people want it" or not. They just tell you whether people liked the sound of the phrase.
@evan I find that this is true or at least people think it should be true. If people post here on public visibility, they should assume everyone in the world will some day see their post. If they don't want that, they have to use different visibility settings.
I think it's always better to be explicit about what you mean, so we don't have misunderstandings. So, a friends of friends would make that explicit: wider than just my immediate circle, but not so wide that all the world can see it.
Some repliers were unsure what "friends" were. I didn't say in the question. "Friends" isn't defined for ActivityPub, but there is a social networking convention that "friends" is for a two-way relationship like in Facebook or LinkedIn. In directed networks like the Fediverse or X, it's sometimes used for mutual follow relationships.
I think the most natural implementation of friends of friends would be as mutuals of mutuals, but there are definitely other definitions that could work.
@evan I don't think introducing mutuals is as a concept is helpful. It complicates things a lot and makes "following" someone have weird unexpected side effects.
Following should mean you get their messages. If you want a "super follow" view that emulates following all the people they're following then sure.
But this should under the control of the reader. Posters shouldn't be able to force themselves into my feed if I didn't follow them. I routinely turn off boosts on people already.
@evan when responding I implied followers of followers. So followers only one step further out
@evan
Not unrelated but I did like the mechanism Google+ used.
Each of your friends could be put into multiple circles & circles could contain circles & any post could be published to any circle. There was no direct evidence of your circle names or members & the indirect evidence was simply who might reply.
Beyond that, you could control visibility of the post & replies to friends (in the post's circle) or friends of friends (all friends of friends in the post's circle).
Something like that.
Facebook used to have a Friends of Friends addressing option, but they have slowly deemphasized it, and as far as I know it's not possible to use anymore.
Google+ had Extended Circles, which weirdly enough was the following of your following, but it seems to have worked pretty well.
