Is there a Fediverse service that allows you to only post to a list of people and/or custom group?
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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.
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In "Let This Radicalize You", Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba talk about the importance of having both safe spaces where you can be fully yourself among friends you trust, and coalitional spaces where it's important to give people grace when they accidentally harm you. Social media without custom groups is necessarily a coalitional space, but of course naturally people want to use it as a safe space. I think having custom groups would help us do both.
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@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
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@julian@fietkau.social @julian@community.nodebb.org
I hadn't even heard of NodeBB, thanks for mentioning it!
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@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.
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@julian@fietkau.social thanks for the me tion!
@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!
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There is not an exact match (yet) but these might help:
You can use Guppe Groups to post to everyone who follows the group, however the visibility of the posts is not limited to members of the group. More info at https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse
You can use followers-only visibility to restrict visibility of your posts to just your followers (many use this on personal accounts). People would have to be following you to see such posts. More info at https://fedi.tips/who-can-see-my-posts-in-mastodon-how-do-i-send-dms-in-mastodon/
