Thanks everyone for voting and sharing your opinion!
Looking at the results, I think this does support the idea that maybe replies to followers-only posts should be automatically private mentions?
Discussion
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@stefan Are you joking? 77% said "my own followers"! How could that possibly mean "me only"?
@evan Well the question was:
"Who do you expect to see replies from when you post a followers-only post?"
So if you only expect to hear from your followers, without reply controls, the visibility of the replies to your post would have to be limited only to you, or, potentially, to you and mutual followers of you and the person replying, but not the followers of the person replying that don't follow you directly.
I think private mentions handle this well and rather simply.
The question was: "Who do you expect to see replies from when you post a followers-only post?"
And the overwhelmingly most popular answer was "My own followers".
When people say that they expect their followers to see replies, then they expect their followers to see replies.
You said:
> So if you only expect to hear from your followers,
That wasn't the question.
> without reply controls,
Irrelevant.
> the visibility of the replies to your post would have to be limited only to you,
No, to your *followers*, which is what everyone said?
> or, potentially, to you and mutual followers of you and the person replying, but not the followers of the person replying that don't follow you directly.
That was an option and an unpopular answer.
@evan Yes, perhaps I could have phrased the original question better.
My thinking was, currently, a follower can reply to a followers-only post, with a followers-only reply.
So their followers can reply back to you, without seeing the original post, potentially deducing and further exposing personal information contained in the original post.
This is a dilemma I myself have sometimes, when I see a followers-only post. Sometimes it just makes sense for me to reply directly, eg. health status updates.
If I replied with a followers-only post saying "good luck with the heart surgery", all my followers will deduce that Alice is having a heart surgery.
@stefan I think you're tying yourself in a lot of knots to not accept that what people want, when they get replies to their followers-only posts, is to have those replies visible to their followers.
When you see a followers-only post, the default audience for your reply should be the OP's followers.
I'd like to make it clear that this is possible with ActivityPub, and it's the way other social networks handle this feature.
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@evan But it can also be a bit awkward when a mutual I don't know too well posts a followers-only post, and I show up "in their DMs", so to speak, when I'm just trying to be mindful of their privacy.