I made an issue in Github, but have found out that it was a decision of the founders to have the opposite behaviour to that I’m requesting. This is therefore more a change of policy than a simple UI tweak, so it probably needs a proper community vote before it goes ahead.
In the pop-up pane which appears when you click the link to add a new aspect, the check box to ‘make contacts in this aspect visible to each other?’ is checked by default.
I think it should be unchecked, for privacy reasons.
There are only certain circumstances in which it’s good to make contacts in an aspect visible to each other, for example a club in which everyone knows each other. And the consequences of inappropriately making contacts visible to each other (a privacy leak) is potentially worse than the consequences of inappropriately making contacts invisible to each other (a minor convenience).
Therefore I think it would be better to have this option unchecked by default, so that someone has to manually check it to make contacts in an aspect visible to each other. This would avoid this being done by accident.
I also think it would be better to make it more obvious whether contacts in one of your aspects are visible to each other, and more obvious how to change this status. At the moment this is by a tiny padlock icon in the pane for that aspect. This is a separate issue, however.
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The contacts on the profile page is the only way I know to discover people by looking at relation.
I agree privacy is the most important thing on diaspora*, so make that opt-in is okay for me, but I think we really should improve the people discovering. A social network is about relation, common interests (tags) are not enough. But we are out of topic for now.
I think we really should improve the people discovering
I agree, but as you say that’s a different topic. This proposal doesn’t make it any harder to discover people, because it will still be just as possible to make contacts in an aspect visible to each other - it just won’t be the default behaviour.
As I said in the opening post, I think the control for changing visibility of contacts to each other after an aspect has been created should be made more obvious, so if someone later decides they want contacts in an aspect to be able to find each other, they’ll be able to find the control to do this easily.