ostatus, Mastodon's base protocol, wasn't written with privacy in mind. It was written with the assumption that a poster would want everyone to be able to read the post, like on a traditional blog. The privacy features built onto Mastodon came out of early user demand and have proven immensely popular, but they're sort of birdhoused onto the protocol and not in the spec. It's time to consider formalizing these features in an RFC or similar document to improve on them.
@dogjaw in a sense, if you publish a newspaper you would want everyone to read it, right? But normal everyday people don't use microblogs like newspapers. They write notes to their friend circles and those can take various degrees of context. The guy writing a zine and giving it to everyone is kind of an aberration
@Trev or to implement new features using XMPP, which was designed with privacy in mind, and gradually transition away from ostatus
@xj9 it already is and you're right on both counts. The least we could do if we continue to extend the protocol is write down what we're doing.
@Trev That sounds like a good idea.
For something that's tacked on after the fact, the system appears to work fairly well. When I silence someone on Mastodon they're gone. On Twitter, forget it.
@Trev I have some experience with Web specification authoring and privacy. is there a mailing list or GitHub repo to dive more deeply into this?
@Trev some people are pointing towards another protocol, #ActivityPub, which already has these issues solved I believe. It should not be impossible to back-port it into #Mastodon, methinks. cc @cwebber