It seems to me robots.txt or #nobot or a flag in the activitystream, or any advisory setting, isn't going to be more than a speed bump to abuse. In fact, it'll be a pain for ordinary users, while the folks with bot/troll armies will ignore that setting and index the fediverse as much as they want. And a "friend-locked" mode feels very restrictive. Maybe: friends-of-friends locked. Maybe some other social-graph algo. Maybe a TOS click-through legal tool.
@sandhawke @maiyannah So, Diaspora and Google Plus both have the aspects/circles thing and this was a popular feature for exactly this reason.
ActivityPub supports this via collections of users. Maybe that's also what people want. (Mastodon and GNU Social don't yet but could.) We haven't emphasized it though in examples...
@maiyannah @sandhawke I know statusnet-style groups, and not totally the same thing. ActivityPub collections generic enough to do either, but:
- aspects/circles: a collection of people addressed to by an individual: select sending this to only "family" or "coworkers"
- groups: more like open-subscription mailing lists
Both are "collections" of sorts, but how "who's in there" is managed is different.
@maiyannah @sandhawke Not familiar with what that means. Is that like a tag on a person's profile?
Distinction is, if I select "family", I'm probably selecting my own family, not everyone's family :)
@mmn @cwebber Some convo on that here https://toot.cat/@cwebber/466346 but it's still not clear to me, who's adding people to the lists?
@mmn Useful info, thanks!
(sharing my own post like a jerk mainly because I'm interested in feedback on it)