@marina

the default in patchfoo is now to only replicate and see content from friends.

I think this is a display only thing. AFAIK patchfoo still replicates 3 hops, just doesn't show you this data in the feed. Is that correct @cel?

Patchwork also only displays content from your friends in the feed. However, it will show you content from your friends-of-friends for channels and replies, and you can browse your friend-of-friend profiles to see all of their posts. You will also see posts you your friends have liked (of people you or they follow) on their profiles.

By the way, in the context above, friend just refers to people you follow, rather than mutual following. Possibly a better word would be "contact". This friend thing is getting confusing!!

if i wanted to change that, how would i do it?

Currently it is not an option in the interface. However you can do it as a command line flag on startup. I think it would be npm start -- --friends.hops 3.

Oh something that I didn't mention before is that you only see profile images and nicknames on profiles from people that they follow directly, or you follow directly.

By the way, in the context above, friend just refers to people you follow, rather than mutual following. Possibly a better word would be "contact". This friend thing is getting confusing!!

Yes, we appear to overload this term in ways that add to the confusion to new users about visibility and its important to tease out what we mean when we speak about friends especially in the context of the current discussion. Thank you for highlighting this.

for distinguishing between friends and reciprocal following. I've unfollowed people on scuttlebutt already not because I don't like them, but because I preferred not to see updates from a few of the people they were following.

In the end, I still saw updates from the person I unfolllowed, because we had mutual friends, but not the problematic individuals. I see follow/unfollow less as an expression of friendship, and more a means of manipulating the structure of the social graph for better curation.

This paper explores the psychological effects of "unfriending" on facebook, but I'm not sure there have been any studies on similar systems where a word other than "friend" was applied to the relationship.