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?
@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?
@z428 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. :smiley187:
@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.
@z428@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: friendica.mrpetovan.com/displa…
@z428 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.
@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.