What about allowing posts that are visible only to mutuals (i.e. not any random person who follows you, which you have no control over unless you lock your account down like a paranoiac), and/or selected lists (as on LiveJournal, Google Circles and Facebook)? Surely that would be possible with Authorised Fetch, yet nobody mentions the possibility.
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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Surely that would be possible with Authorised Fetch, yet nobody mentions the possibility.
Not really (in practice, anyway). Authorized fetch without cooperation from the remote instance only works on a per-instance basis. If you have a mutual from an instance then every follower from that instance would see your theoratical "mutuals only" post, if the only access control you have is authorized fetch.
There are some people working on circles and other ways of limiting visibility more granularly than what we have, but those will have to be supported by both ends. You may be able to hack together a gigantic mentions only thread with double digits of people on there without modifying server code too much, but the UX there would be terrible enough for that to not be viable (and certain anti-spam functionality like hellthread MRFs may end up kicking in which prevent that from federating to instances that have those enabled (especially after the recent Japanese spam attacks))
Mutuals-only posts would be useful, and have been requested since 2018 if not earlier. As @ShittyKopper points out there are challenges; Claire's 2020 comment https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/7135#issuecomment-636767048 discusses the issues in more detail. Then again some other fediverse software has them already ... and Claire's comparison to follower-only posts highlights that it could be done, it's just not a priority. So this is another good example of something that's not likely to get addressed with today's structure, and potentially could be a fork with different priorities -- if resources are avaialble, which is of course a big if.