@evan Yes, perhaps I could have phrased the original question better.

My thinking was, currently, a follower can reply to a followers-only post, with a followers-only reply.

So their followers can reply back to you, without seeing the original post, potentially deducing and further exposing personal information contained in the original post.

This is a dilemma I myself have sometimes, when I see a followers-only post. Sometimes it just makes sense for me to reply directly, eg. health status updates.

If I replied with a followers-only post saying "good luck with the heart surgery", all my followers will deduce that Alice is having a heart surgery.

@evan i think you know where i already stand on this, but instead of recursively crawling replies collections it would be better if alice had a collection that alice owned and contained a flat set of whatever alice wanted to be in it.

i think "bob gets to choose" is not inherently problematic insofar as alice never actually established any context. bob's post stands on its own, with any arbitrary audience. if there *was* such a thing as "alice's convo" then it can/should have its own audience.

@entichahoosh I did not know that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeux_sans_fronti%C3%A8res

@stefan

You said:

> So if you only expect to hear from your followers,

That wasn't the question.

> without reply controls,

Irrelevant.

> the visibility of the replies to your post would have to be limited only to you,

No, to your *followers*, which is what everyone said?

> or, potentially, to you and mutual followers of you and the person replying, but not the followers of the person replying that don't follow you directly.

That was an option and an unpopular answer.

@stefan

The question was: "Who do you expect to see replies from when you post a followers-only post?"

And the overwhelmingly most popular answer was "My own followers".

When people say that they expect their followers to see replies, then they expect their followers to see replies.

@evan I got the Gabriel reference first. when I went to England I realized he got it from a TV show ... hopefully I'll be the only vote

@evan Well the question was:

"Who do you expect to see replies from when you post a followers-only post?"

So if you only expect to hear from your followers, without reply controls, the visibility of the replies to your post would have to be limited only to you, or, potentially, to you and mutual followers of you and the person replying, but not the followers of the person replying that don't follow you directly.

I think private mentions handle this well and rather simply.

@evan I’ve been thinking a lot about how daring and the pursuit of new frontiers is the essence of US national identity, and how that’s tied up with our apparent inability to invest in the sustainability of anything good we’ve built.

@stefan Are you joking? 77% said "my own followers"! How could that possibly mean "me only"?

@paul Sorry, it's kind of complicated. Here's the page for the course. And it's more entrepreneurship and design than tech policy, if I have it right.

https://kellercenter.princeton.edu/courses/designing-protocols-technology-governance-and-collective-action