Friend-only posts and why we need them

So far, #ssb (speaking as a patchwork user here) is most similar to Twitter when comparing it to traditional social media. In the sense that (apart from private messages) everything you do is public to anyone that asks to download it.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal (even if this was just as relevant before) we are reminded of the need for privacy online. I really like that ssb lets me have my own universe where posts by friends and friends-of-friends are the only thing I see. The problem that remains is that this doesn't work the other way around. Cambridge Analytica/Google/NSA could begin tomorrow (or yesterday) with reading all my public post data off of some pub and start analyzing my behavior. I don't like this.

From my perspective it doesn't seem to require much re-engineering to make friend-only posts work. They'd essentially be private messages that by default were sent to everyone you are friends with right now and maybe even retroactively to new friends. (There was some talk about being able to mark people as "real friends", this might be relevant here. There might be individuals that I love to read posts by, but that I'd never want to share private posts with.) Could someone with more ssb dev experience chip in here?

I guess this is a bit #somebodyshould but I at least want to get the discussion started (or reignited, I might be late to the party). I feel privacy is a part of this social network that really needs more attention.

I have been pondering this as well. The problem with this approach is mostly as I see it that we let a few bad apples ruin the fun. The internet is great exactly because we share. The problem was facebook insistency on 1) using real names and 2) on getting people to add facebook like to their pages to help them track. The last trick they took from Google (analytics). Its not like they are alone in this, the whole tracking on the web is a big mess.

@arj IMO it's not just a few bad apples, there are 2500-4000 data brokers in the US, plus pretty much every government, who are all doing their best to get their hands on as much data about you as possible. And even if there were only a couple bad apples; those are some majorly bad apples.

True, what I'm saying is that the problem is not so much posting things online. Its the data broker business that should be illegal. Its crazy that we have learned nothing from the stasi age.

Relevant: Deleting (your) posts, %aTxuHLi...