“It's not that big of a deal that users don't understand how their privacy settings work” they said.

ANYWAY, for those who haven't heard, Mastodon recently changed how private posts work. I wrote up a quick overview of the changes, which you can read HERE: >>>> https://marrus-sh.github.io/mastodon-info/everything-you-need-to-know-about-privacy-v1.3-020150428.html

Here are my more political thoughts about this change: [thread]

ANYWAY (1) This change should have been announced to everyone, and MOST IMPORTANTLY to client developers, AT LEAST A WEEK before implementation. Right now Amaroq (for example) still says that private posts only federate to "followers on your instance", even though THIS IS NO LONGER TRUE, because the app hasn't had time to update to reflect the new changes.

This just REINFORCES the impression that Mastodon devs don't care about client devs enough to warn them about things ahead of time or (ideally!) give them a way of knowing which features a particular Mastodon instance supports. AFAIK Amaroq has no way of notifying users if their instance is running the 1.3 update or not.

(2) Changing the name from "Private" to "Followers only" might be a helpful and good change, but I FEAR that it is being used AS A COP-OUT for not better implementing real privacy features before shipping. People WANT private posts. And by "private" I mean "as private as e-mail, or Facebook". They don't want "followers-only-and-I-abdicate-all-responsibility-for-what-happens" posts.