Private groups

@william ⁂ maggos @silverpill Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are much closer to Facebook-style social networking than to Twitter-style social media. In fact, they're descendants of Friendica, the first decentralised dedicated Facebook alternative. (Let's set aside that Hubzilla is usually referred to as something like a "social CMS" for a moment.)

They have multiple ways of rendering groups private, all of which go beyond Mastodon's way of making something private by limiting the receiving actors.

For starters, private groups only grant their own members permission to receive any content from the group. Also, private groups only grant their own members permission to see the group stream. Furthermore, private groups only grant their own members permission to see the group channel profile and its contacts. On Hubzilla, these are all separate options.

On top of all this, they can hide groups from directories. That way, these groups can be made known only by hearsay and/or personal contact to interested users. This doesn't necessarily make them private; it makes them secret.

All these options are available for normal, non-group-actor channels as well, by the way.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #PrivateGroups

@silverpill @william ⁂ maggos On Hubzilla, the group admin defines a special contact role for moderators in which the permission "Can administer my channel" is activated. Then they assign that contact role to those who have client-side OpenWebAuth support whom you trust to be additional admins/mods.

On (streams) and Forte, the group admin can activate and deactivate single permissions for each contact, so you don't need an extra permission role. Otherwise, the principle is the same.

Either way, to my best understanding, the co-admins can't administer the group/forum channel from their own account/channel page. They will have to open the group/forum channel page and be recognised via OpenWebAuth.

The advantage of this is that anyone anywhere that has client-side OpenWebAuth support can become a co-admin, even if something as minimalistic as snac2 or GoToSocial decided to adopt client-side OpenWebAuth. They just need to be recognisable.

The downside of this is that it'll never work in a phone app, and the co-admins will have to get used to the Web UI of wherever they're co-admins.

By the way, Friendica allows for co-admins, too, but only on the same node.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #OpenWebAuth #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups

@silverpill Google Plus Circles was perfect. I just want that functionality. It was basically specific distribution lists you could address posts to and people outside those groups could not see it if set to private.

@silverpill I remember Diaspora had a perfect 1:1 UI clone of Google Plus and then... It didn't. Diasspointing

@Mitch Conner @silverpill Exactly this exists on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. With even more options, actually. Hubzilla calls them "privacy groups", (streams) and Forte call them "access lists".

Now it comes: You can not only post to one specific such group/list. You can also post to several ones. Or to any combination of privacy groups/access lists and single contacts.

Better yet: You can even exclude single contacts or the members of certain privacy groups/access lists. You can post to the members of privacy groups Foo and Bar, except if they're also in privacy group Baz, and except for Alice, and in addition, you can post to Bob and Carol.

In addition, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte don't just define who receives the post. They don't simply flag it a DM either. They flag it "restricted" and only grant the recipients permission to read the post, read any comments and interact with anything in the conversation. In practice, this also means that those who have these permissions can not only interact with the original poster, but just as well with each other, because it isn't a DM.

Anything that doesn't understand these permissions, e.g. Mastodon, do understand it as a DM. This limits their possibilities to interact, but it's the safe way.

And yet, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte still have private and/or secret groups with moderation (like Facebook groups) on top of all this. (streams) and Forte even optionally have two levels of non-moderator users.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #PrivateGroups #Permissions #PrivacyGroups #AccessLists

@mitchconner @silverpill it's possible to do it federated and encrypted using broadcast encryption, or treekem/beekem if you're going for group-like moderation, not worth adding to fedi though the protocol is broken by design

But Mastodon doesn’t have it so

@Blurry Moon @silverpill In theory, Mastodon users can connect to ("follow") any of these groups.

In practice, connecting something that has no understanding of a) enclosed conversations, b) groups and c) permissions, something like Mastodon, to a private Hubzilla forum, (streams) group or Forte group probably isn't such a good idea.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #PrivateGroups

@silverpill

I get the feeling that a lot of people here are confusing two things that work in completely different ways. Some people use the term ‘group’ to mean something more like the Circles on Google+ or the ‘Aspects’ on Diaspora*, whilst others mean something more like Facebook groups.

Both exist on Hubzilla (and (streams) and Forte). The former is called a ‘Privacy Group’ on Hubzilla and is what @Jupiter Rowland  described in his first post; the second variant is called a ‘Community Forum’ (or simply ‘Forum’) on Hubzilla and was mentioned by @Jupiter Rowland  in his second post.




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