More fine-grained post privacy options : cohost support

b

bazelgeuse-apologist

started a topic 7 months ago

Another suggestion from another site, this one from Dreamwidth! Dreamwidth allows you to control visibility on a per-post basis. You have an Access List which you can add users to, and you can choose whether a post is visible to everyone, to only people on your Access List, or to yourself only. You also have the ability to create sublists in addition to your Access List, so if users A, B, C, and D are on your Access List, you can create a sublist that's just users A and B and make a post visible only to said sublist. That being said, this does have the potential for abuse in that you can create sublists to show different people alternate versions of the same post without telling them. Pillowfort has followers-only and a mutuals-only post privacy options, but I personally don't like that setup very much. Followers-only can be easily bypassed by following someone, reading all their posts, and then unfollowing. Mutuals-only assumes that the people I follow are also people that I want to share the more private parts of my life with - not true! Sometimes I just like someone's art. Being able to choose who specifically can see stuff is far preferable.

b

bazelgeuse-apologist

said 7 months ago

Oh dear, didn't realize this platform eats paragraph breaks. Anyway! I just realized that a potential sticking point here is that pages can be managed by multiple users, and there's no way to tell who runs a page or even *if* a page is run by multiple people to begin with. Which might have some awkward interactions with adding pages to access lists? (In general, I'd hope that page owners make it fairly obvious if a page is communal, and that people adding pages understand that communal pages can change membership, but people always find creative social edge cases.) I guess one option around this is to show who's behind a page, but I feel like this would compromise anonymity. Maybe a multiple-user page could be marked as such without showing the individual members? But that might be a separate suggestion.

L

Leonora Tindall

said 7 months ago

I think permitting individual posts to be shared with individual users would be great! However, I also think there are improvements to be made here that aren't nearly as complex. For instance, simply being able to allow/deny reposts on a post-by-post basis, make individual posts private (as in, followers only and not displayed to not-logged-in users) and so forth is very important.

s

saya

said 7 months ago

Came here to request something like this! Livejournal friends-locking is another implementation of this concept, where "following"/"followers" is distinct from "friends", but otherwise it behaves similarly to the access lists OP described. Twitter circles is another, which behaves like a single access list.

d

drewbabe

said about 2 months ago

Other things to consider would be options like "unlisted" (opt out of tag searching and other discoverability options) as well as "global" i.e. opting in to this other feature request.

Also, if we get notification filters, then it would be nice to be able to, say, enable getting notifications for smaller circles of trust, but not larger ones.

I think this also has the possibility of providing some of the relief being asked for in the feature request for locking replies. Can't have goons replying with weird stuff if you don't publish to the whole site.

Also for consideration: the commenters in the requests for sending people posts and @-mentions to cause a notification have expressed concerns that it could lead to spam. Making it possible to only send people posts if the post is at a lower visibility level, or only cause a notification when they're @-mentioned if they're part of the group of people who are in the lower visibility level (e.g. mutual followers), would help address those spam concerns, I think.