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Is there a Fediverse service that allows you to only post to a list of people and/or custom group? Facebook has had this for ages but I believe Mastodon doesn't.
Being able to post to custom lists of follows would help me engage with people on here in healthier ways. For example, when venting, I'd love to be able to limit to friends who I trust not to "well, actually" me (or with whom I care enough to repair with if they do). Instead I often just don't post at all.
@shauna Realistically, maybe NodeBB could enable that kinda thing in a usable way? @julian@community.nodebb.org
For Mastodon, handling conversational contexts/containers is probably a blocker to any serious advances on this idea. Even followers-only posting barely works for a back-and-forth discussion, as visibility swaps per reply between the followers of each person involved.
Some momentum is there though, and maybe Mastodon will see some advances on the issue this year.
https://community.nodebb.org/topic/18647/the-state-of-conversational-contexts-february-2025
@julian@fietkau.social @julian@community.nodebb.org
I hadn't even heard of NodeBB, thanks for mentioning it!
@shauna NodeBB is approaching the problem from the perspective of traditional web forums more than Twitter-likes, so it may or may not look like what you're envisioning. But from what I can see, they're taking their federation work very seriously, including with Mastodon. So it could well be viable as a home base for a community that wants to talk in internal sub-groups a bunch, but also with the wider fediverse.
@julian@fietkau.social thanks for the mention!
@shauna@social.coop that's an interesting question, because it is directly related to one of the "hard problems" that fedi can't solve yet — federated private groups.
I have some ideas on how to accomplish this, but there are lots of questions around how to implement this in the confines of some of the expectations of micro-blogging software like Mastodon.
Expect some experimentation on this in 2025!
@silverpill @julian@community.nodebb.org @julian@fietkau.social
My original question was actually less about private groups, and more about the idea of being able to restrict visibility to a custom list of people. Custom groups is a distinct but related feature. Both seem to be pretty hard in a federated system.
@shauna @julian @julian On the ActivityPub side of things, lists and groups are very similar. I don't know about Hubzilla, but Streams definitely supports lists (also known as "circles").
These features are not very difficult to implement. I documented what Streams is doing and published it for others to review (FEP-171b). Getting everyone on the same page is where it gets real hard, but we're making progress