Sharing vs. following

Features and Ideas
1

if you start sharing with someone your profile is shared with that person (respectively the owner of this account).
in my opinion this is not necessary. there should be an option to follow an account without sharing your profile.
i think there are 2 options to handle this:

  1. allow users to create one profile for each aspect (problem: which profile is shown to people which are in more than one aspect?)
  2. differentiate between sharing and following => sharing means also sharing your profile. following means sharing without sharing your profile.

Note: This discussion was imported from Loomio. Click here to view the original discussion.

1 Like
2

i think the second option is the better one.

3

me too. so we then would need a simple way to integrate this into the UI. maybe we could adjust the aspect-dropdown and add a follow-option.

4

if you start sharing with someone your profile is shared with that person

What do you understand by that ? What is your problem with your profile being accessible to people you are sharing with?

5

the point is, if i want to get news, lets say from a company, i don’t want them to be able to see my profile, only for the reason, that i’d like to see their latest posts in my stream.

1 Like
6

Note that your profile is constituted from two part : basic and extended and you can choose to keep your extended profile private.

From a technical point of view, I think the benefit is not worth the effort.

7

I’ve always thought the way diaspora does sharing/following is hugely broken.

Sharing and following should be different things. And also I should be able to share, without following.

In short;

  • Adding someone to an aspect would grant them access to your profile - you are now sharing with them
  • Following someone does not give access to the person - you are only following their public posts, or whatever posts they are exposing to you.
8

I can’t remember how many people I’ve cut off by removing them from my aspects because I don’t want to follow them. I don’t want to not share with them, I just get tired of seeing their posts :slight_smile:

9

+1 @jasonrobinson

10

I simpler solution would be to just let the user choose which aspect are displayed in stream. This way you can have an aspect Following for the people you want to follow in your stream.

11

Perhaps this discussion should be renamed “Sharing vs. Following” or similar?

12

Proposal: Should sharing be split into sharing and following?

I’ll cite Jason’s comment (which for me hits the nail on the head):

I’ve always thought the way diaspora does sharing/following is hugely broken.
Sharing and following should be different things. And also I should be able to share, without following.
In short;

  • Adding someone to an aspect would grant them access to your profile - you are now sharing with them
  • Following someone does not give access to the person - you are only following their public posts, or whatever posts they are exposing to you.

Outcome: N/A

Votes:

  • Yes: 15
  • Abstain: 3
  • No: 0
  • Block: 0

Note: This proposal was imported from Loomio. Vote details, some comments and metadata were not imported. Click here to view the proposal with all details on Loomio.

1 Like
13

Yes, I d appreciate it a lot. 2 organize by aspects is not as smooth in reality, I ve tried that; I can t get related to channel spamming by #tags-> does that need explanation? can relate 2 Jason’s comment, I also ignore people to ensure a nice and interesting stream.

14

Feel free to share this proposal or reshare my post :wink:

15

Hi, there could be a third way to do that : select for each aspect if your profile is visible or not for contacts in this aspect. That way you could easily have a “just following” aspect. And it makes possible for “users you share with but do not allow to see your profile” (i.e. users you simply follow, but have been notified that you share with them) to contact you with a personnal message which is only possible for users you share with. This later point has not been taken into account in this discussion I think.

16
  • Adding someone to an aspect would grant them access to your profile - you are now sharing with them
  • Following someone does not give access to the person - you are only following their public posts, or whatever posts they are exposing to you.

Umm, am I missing something? This is exactly what happens now, and has always been the case, in diaspora.

17

@loelo i thought about that, too. I think the problem is, this will get too complicated from a ui point of view. A user first would have to manage his aspects. And i think users are lazy. If i have the possibilities share and follow directly as a one- or two-click action (think of the aspect-dropdown) this will be much more straight-forward.
If the proposal is accepted, i’d also propose a “following”-entry in the left nav-bar, which will show all posts of accounts you are following.
@goob the sharing functionality has always been there. What is new, is the following-functionality.
I’ve written down some possible states. I hope they’ll help to clarify the proposal:
a)
Bob follows Alice. Alice doesn’t follow or share with Bob.
=> Bob will see all public posts of Alice in his stream.
[Alice won’t see Bob’s private profile, if she visits his page. I’d also propose not to mention Alice at all, that Bob is following her. However, a follower-count on Alice’s profile page would be nice (like on Twitter).]
b)
Bob follows Alice. Alice follows Bob.
=> They both will see each others public posts in their stream, but can not access each others profiles.
c)
Bob follows Alice. Alice shares with Bob.
=> Bob will see Alices public posts and all posts from the aspect Alice put him in. Bob also will see Alice’s profile. Alice can not see Bob’s profile. Alice will see Bob’s public posts in her stream.
d)
Bob shares with Alice. Alice shares with Bob.
=> Both will see each others public posts, as well as all posts from the aspects they are put in. Also, they will see each others profiles.

18

Maybe the solution is simply to upgrade the aspect concept. Aspects can be so much more than just a group of users, if we give the possibility to configure each of our aspects, we could say that you don’t want to share your stuff with the users in this specific aspect.

We can even add more granularity later on.

Edit:
Just seen @loelo’s post which is the same proposition.

19

@kas: I disagree, in D* when you want to see someone’s posts, you simply add him/her in an aspect. If you start to add possibilities in this simple process, you’ll add more complexities right at the beginning.

Also, if we don’t have an aspect for the user we follow, where would be listed the followed users? We’ll have to create a new kind of group for all the followed users or, worse, we’ll have to check each of our users to see which of them we are just following or sharing with.

I think the possibility to configure your aspects is much more elegant. By default (when creating a new account), we could create a Followed aspect that is pre-configured to only follow people. Of course, if the aspect config can be changed (or not… it’s a design choice).

20

Thanks for the input. I’m not 100% sure which is the best way.
I’ve created a quick mockup (sorry for the bad quality), which shows the way i thought of and personally would consider very convenient. Imho it would be more complex to adjust the settings for each aspect than having one more option in the dropdown. For sure, it should be clear, what happens if you follow an account. Therefore, i propose a small popup when hovering over “follow” (second pic).
Implementing this using the aspect-system probably is not a bad idea (@denschub would this be a possibility to prevent a db blow up?), but i think following should be standard and not an editable aspect. I also think sharing and following should be separated in the general diaspora environment. Diaspora was always about controlling your (social) data. Following would be an enhancement of this concept.