Chats are now federating as limited-visibility posts on the fediverse

Jon

@[email protected] yeah, horrible UX. talk about violating the principle of least surprise! it's happened to me more than once.

Sharkey bizarrely has almost the inverse UX problem. The 'to' list is separate, as it should be ... but if it's more than a couple of people it extends off the right side of the screen (at least in Firefox) and there's no way to scroll. So I replied to a DM that had five people in it, deleted their mentions from the main text ... and still replied to them because they were on the To line, just not visible.

And then I'm pretty sure that if you DM reply on Mastodon to the Sharkey message, accounts show up in the reply even though there's absolutely no evidence that they were on the message you were replying to (because the mentions weren't there in the text, and Mastodon doesn't show a separate To line, or something like that). @[email protected] I think you ran into this as well?

Easy. Just like email. Yeah right. lolsob.

Scott M. Stolz

It would be nice if Direct Messages (DMs) or Private Messages (PMs) were treated like email and only sent to the people you are sending it to.

But generally, on most platforms, if you mention someone in the top level post, they are assumed to be on the recipient list. (Note, some platforms, like Mastodon, treat every post as if it were a top level post.)

Hubzilla has more privacy features, which prevents your messages from leaking to others, but part of that is because we use the Zot protocol between Hubzilla instances, and can set privacy at the thread level (i.e. the permissions of the top level post is the permissions for the entire thread).

When the same conversation is sent via ActivityPub, we lose a lot of control over the privacy of that post. We can and do address it to specific recipients, but other platforms don't have the same types of access controls, which means we can't enforce the access control list for that conversation on those platforms.

julian

@[email protected] might be I can't send messages to you. Not sure if it's a Sharkey thing or a blahaj.zone thing.

Jon

Seems to work! WHy did you think it didn't?

EDIT: oh wait, this is actually an unlisted post, it didn't work, I was confused. I'll try from a mastodon account.

@[email protected]

julian

@[email protected] ah okay great! Just wasn't sure because I didn't get your replies (if any, but now I'm guessing you probably just +1'd them which I don't handle yet!)

Jon

@[email protected] no, no, i just edited my post, I was confused ... in fact it wasn't working, I'll try from a Mastodon account

The Nexus of Privacy

Speaking of the principle of least surprise ... @jdp23 is post got auto-boosted by @activitypub but there wasn't anything that indicated to me that was going to happen.

And, from GoToSocial, the topic's subject shows up nicely from Julian, @jdp23's reply lost the topic, but it showed back up in Julian's reply to the (topicless) reply ... Behavior's similar on Sharkey, although the subject doesn't render as nicely (but it's still readable)

With the @thenexusofprivacy account on Glitch, the subjects don't show up at all -- not even in Julian's original post.

@stefan @julian

The Nexus of Privacy

And also speaking of violations of the principle of least surprise: it's interesitng to look at how these posts do and don't show up on the Discourse thread at https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/chats-are-now-federating-as-limited-visibility-posts-on-the-fediverse/4650/15 ...

Julian's posts are all fine, no surprise, but a good sign for Discourse/NodeBB federation.
@jdp23's posts show up twice on that thread.
@nexus 's post didn't show up on that thread. So on average, my posts are getting there one, which is good, but the standard deviation's higher than I'd like.

Now how about this post from Mastodon?

@stefan @julian

Stefan Bohacek

@jdp23 @julian

"I think you ran into this as well?"

I only recall the situation you just described, when I received a mention without being included.

But I have seen others run into similar situations when they just didn't know that tagging people adds them to a group conversation.

Stefan Bohacek

@jdp23 @julian I've been pretty aware of this myself, but for some reason, on a few occasions I've replied to posts I thought were private, and were in fact public.

Nothing embarrassing though! It helps to just be nice to people privately *and* publicly.

Stefan Bohacek

@thenexusofprivacy @jdp23 @nexus @julian Hah, yeah, seeing mine!

Even though I've been in the fediverse for over a year now, and I'm pretty used to folks from different platforms talking to each other, it's still pretty fascinating to see this between platforms that I don't typically interact with.

Had the same sort of an "aha moment" with Lemmy not too long ago!

The Nexus of Privacy

Yeah, it's amazing when it works. When I tag a Lemmy community in a pst here and it actually shows up as a thread there, it's very cool.

Unfortunately half the time I tag a Lemmy community it doesn't show up as a post there, and there's never indication way. So it's not always amazing. But still, it's amazing when it works!

@stefan @jdp23 @nexus @julian

Jupiter Rowland

@Stefan Bohacek @jdp23 @julian "Shadow mentioning" is a thing. (streams) and Forte do it to avoid clutter. Mentions don't have to be visible in a post/comment to work.