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1. NEETzsche (neetzsche@iddqd.social)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 18:07:50 JST NEETzsche

   • LS
   • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:

   We need a visibility rating between unlisted and private that doesn’t show up on any timelines at all but can be viewable on your profile by anybody.

   This would be used for anti-hellthreading purposes. Right now, my fork of Soapbox marks all replies as unlisted so that if a hellthread emerges, it doesn’t clog up everybody’s public timelines with garbage. But unlisted still shows up on personal timelines, like if you follow one of us.

   Having a visibility between that doesn’t show up in any timelines at all but also isn’t exactly hidden could prove useful as an anti-hellthreading method. This is meant as brainstorming

   cc @hj @lain

   • Machismo repeated this.
   • LS (lain@lain.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 18:07:49 JST LS

     in reply to

     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:
     @NEETzsche @hj Timelines don't necessarily correspond to visibility levels, and activitypub itself has no visibility levels at all, so they are inferred by the addressing. I don't see how to express "show this only in a user's timeline" in actvitypub. I don't think visibility levels are the right solution for the hellthread issue.
   • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag: (hj@shigusegubu.club)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 18:19:46 JST Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:

     in reply to

     • LS
     @NEETzsche @lain scopes are shit. I would rather have an MRF or a setting so that hellthreads (posts that have more than N mentions) do not show up on timelines but still are accessible.
   • Machismo (zerglingman@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 18:22:06 JST Machismo

     in reply to

     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:
     @NEETzsche @lain @hj I think the simpler solution is to replace scopes with flags (may need to add a flag or two like "display to anyone with url", then default state is "display to nobody"), then just new profiles come with a set of default flag groups that they can use that have all the names and behaviours of the current scopes.
   • NEETzsche (neetzsche@iddqd.social)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 18:22:07 JST NEETzsche

     in reply to

     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:

     Yeah, like I said, it would require a lot of restructuring and I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. The subtle difference between “display only to followers” with the option to include/exclude it from your own personal timeline as well and the “followers only scope” is not self-evident to you, and you’re a smart guy. What about some normie who shows up and has no idea what the fediverse is? It might be too much. Choice paralysis, subtle distinctions that usually don’t make a lick of difference to a real person.

     So basically, I agree with you.

     And consider the goal of the OP: people should be able to be in a hellthread without subjecting everybody who follows them to said hellthread, and without the user having to really think about it. I’ll rub my chin on this more.

   • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag: (hj@shigusegubu.club)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 18:22:08 JST Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:

     in reply to

     • LS
     @NEETzsche @lain there might be a bit of confusion from UX/UI standpoint - how's "display only to followers" different from "followers only scope" and why are there different settings?
     
     From security/privacy standpoint it's bullshit because every software has to support it properly, and by default everything will not since it's a new thing. And our experience in this field shows that only way to ensure privacy is to break compatibility (by changing the AP type, essentially), and as you can see Pleroma Chats got jack shit support from other server software (honorable mention - fork of Pleroma, creatively called Akkoma, removed support for them entirely).
     
     We can have "suggest" flags, that can be used to "hint" software to display a post in some different way (collapse by default, display attachments in certain way, suggest that "subject line" is used as a CW, etc), for stuff that we don't necessarily care that other side might display it incorrectly.
   • NEETzsche (neetzsche@iddqd.social)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 18:22:09 JST NEETzsche

     in reply to

     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:

     I kind of agree on scopes being shit. As I was writing that I was thinking of something entirely orthogonal to both scopes and MRFs: flags. Think flags that do this:

     • Display only to followers
     • Display on federated timelines
     • Display on local timeline
     • Display in follower feeds
     • Display in profile feed

     Would give the user pretty granular control as to where things show up. It would also require a lot of restructuring and I’m not sure it’s worth it. But since it’s brainstorming, we can just make shit up and see what sticks.

   • NEETzsche (neetzsche@iddqd.social)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 18:25:09 JST NEETzsche

     in reply to

     • Machismo
     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:

     I recommended flags a bit further down in this thread, actually. I think it would have been smart if we did it at the outset, but it would require coordination on the part of too many maintainers to be realistic. Think trying to make flags compatible with Mastodon and Misskey, and also backward compatible with older version of Pleroma, as a thought experiment to see why me and HJ are thinking it might not be a wise attempt.

     Machismo likes this.
   • Machismo (zerglingman@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 18:25:21 JST Machismo

     in reply to

     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:
     @NEETzsche @hj @lain Just write AP2.
   • NEETzsche (neetzsche@iddqd.social)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 18:53:21 JST NEETzsche

     in reply to

     • Machismo
     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:

     If I could seriously start over I’d change quite a bit tbh. But then again I’m sure that could be said for it all. So many design choices are dealt with more than they are fully agreed-upon, especially as the years roll by. Knowing when to pull the plug on older tech, including older software, is more art than science. Should we still be using IRC, for example? Just deal with the lack of avatars and rely on copes like NickServs and bouncers? You’d be surprised how many people insist, yes, we should do exactly that.

     Me personally, I’m not entirely sold on abandoning AP yet.

     Machismo likes this.
   • Machismo (zerglingman@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 18:54:53 JST Machismo

     in reply to

     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:
     @NEETzsche @hj @lain I don't think it has to be abandoned to support a new proto.
   •  (mint@ryona.agency)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 19:42:19 JST 

     in reply to

     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:
     @hj @NEETzsche @lain >I assume that whether post is public or unlisted is determined whether instance's global inbox is on cc list or not
     It's a hardcoded value of "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public". If it's in `to`, the post is public, if `cc`, it's unlisted.
     t. wrote an MRF to convert followers-only posts to public scope to take the piss on lockfags
   • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag: (hj@shigusegubu.club)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 19:42:21 JST Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:

     in reply to

     • LS
     @NEETzsche @lain i also want to add that "adding new scope" is a bit difficult, because scopes literally do not exist on AP level, it's a mastodonism that only really exists in MastoAPI, i.e. backend-to-frontend communication. In reality scope determines and is determined by whom post is addressed, i.e. what to/cc fields are. I really don't know details but I assume that whether post is public or unlisted is determined whether instance's global inbox is on cc list or not, or something along these lines.
     
     I don't know if it's possible to add attributes/metadata to activities though, i sure fucking hope it's possible, but with API you never know. Last time it went something like this
     (from discussion on adding detection if server supports chats)
     >won't sever respond with 400 Bad Request if it receives an activity it doesn't understand?
     <no, by standard it has to respond with 200 and just don't say anything
     Machismo repeated this.
   • Machismo (zerglingman@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 19:43:17 JST Machismo

     in reply to

     • 
     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:
     @mint @lain @NEETzsche @hj Extremely based
      likes this.
   •  (mint@ryona.agency)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 19:48:26 JST 

     in reply to

     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:
     @hj @NEETzsche @lain This will impact DMs which are entirely non-ambiguous (have an explicitly defined list of recepients) and thus aren't manged in any capacity. You have nothing to fear if your instance doesn't have active lockfags anyway.
   • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag: (hj@shigusegubu.club)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 19:48:27 JST Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:

     in reply to

     • 
     • LS
     @mint @NEETzsche @lain I guess I should add your instances to quarantine then.
   • NEETzsche (neetzsche@iddqd.social)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 20:43:46 JST NEETzsche

     in reply to

     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:

     We go into this in detail in the rest of the thread. HJ convinced me I was wrong to explore this path.

     LS likes this.
   • NEETzsche (neetzsche@iddqd.social)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 23:47:17 JST NEETzsche

     in reply to

     • 
     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:

     Does it do anything with unlisted posts or just private ones?

      likes this.
   •  (mint@ryona.agency)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 23:48:40 JST 

     in reply to

     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:
     @NEETzsche @lain @hj Unlisted is also converted to public. Bots are handled by separate policy which then turns them back into unlisted.
   •  (mint@ryona.agency)'s status on Tuesday, 28-Nov-2023 23:50:11 JST 

     in reply to

     • 
     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:
     @NEETzsche @hj @lain That was more of a side effect but the one I enjoy. Makes TWKN more chaotic.
   • NEETzsche (neetzsche@iddqd.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Nov-2023 00:44:04 JST NEETzsche

     in reply to

     • 
     • LS
     • Proud owner of a potato sack :flag:
     @mint lol my fork of soapbox makes all replies by default go to unlisted, not because I have any motivation to truly hide my posts, but out of a sense of politeness for everybody else. Just imagine if my hellthreads clogged up everybody's fucking timelines. You can clog up your own timeline though lol and it seems like that's all your mrf does
     
     @lain @hj
      likes this.