Features for blogging system

[jack]

Not for an immediate livejournal replacement, but in general, how useful do you think friends-locking is, as compared to restricting to an arbitrary community? There seem to be several models used currently:

* Everything public
* Everything restricted to one community (eg. chiark, eg. an lj community, eg. the forum of a website) with some filtering to ensure that random people can't just join.
* Restricted to a set of people you know (a friends list)
* Restricted to a subset of people you know (eg. close friends, or people in society X)
* Restricted *from* a subset of people (eg. friends except for mum and friends of mum)

Almost all of the time I want posts to be either:

* Public, or
* Public to everyone online, but not to people I've never met

I appreciate the ability to talk to a subset of people, but rarely actually use it. The latter is when, if I were in a restricted community, I wouldn't mind posting to everyone in it, but don't want it completely public.

That is currently accomplished a couple of different ways. A restricted community of people on one server. That works, but gets awkward as it grows -- new people can socialise with community friends in a community only by joining one or the other. Or locking to a friends-list, but that means you can't get helpful drive-by comments from friends-of-friends.

Ideally, I'd like *both*. So journal posts I make can be seen by *either* members of the SGO *or* other people I designate as friends (or in an extreme case, according to my own pet heuristic, eg. "anyone in these groups, any other friends, and any of their friends except X, Y and Z". But even if the community was restricted to be "set of people on this server" that would be useful.

This is just one of the things I'm bearing it mind would be nice to think about in theory, and people use something instead of livejournal, it would be nice if it were able to have it.

Comments

[lizzip.livejournal.com]

I find friends-locking *extremely* useful for several reasons, but then I'm in a not-exactly-normal-among-your-friendslist situation, so.

Also, not everybody wants to read my whinges about my periods :)

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

Oh, when I have period whinges, I deliberately make sure that everybody gets to hear about them.

[lizzip.livejournal.com]

Mine's a pretty epic saga involving whinging repeatedly at doctors. It seems polite to avoid boring people overmuch...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Appreciated :)

Although another thing for my utopian blogging system is to have opt-out filters, where if you don't want to keep it secret but don't want to thrust it on people, you can specify a tag/filter on some of your posts, and other people can choose to exclude those posts, but opt-in again later if they like.

I think it's purely a coincidence that the way livejournal is designed you have to use a filter for that.

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

I usually couldn't care less about people I've never met but would use friends-locking in order to lock a post *from* a specific person, e.g. to whinge about someone, or to talk about my supervisor.

In practice I never did that because it annoyed me to have to lock out arbitrary people who didn't have LJ accounts but were as trusted as all the people who did, but I am aware of things I didn't post that I might've if, say, I could lock my journal posts with a .htaccess and hand the password to anyone I chose.

Something else I would like (livejournal, other blogging software) to provide is the ability to subscribe to/filter on tags.

e.g.
- not having to restrict "filter groups" to friends-only when the content is public and you just don't want to spam people with it if they don't want to be spammed
- some people whom I don't know and whose LJs I read specifically for their essays on XYZ

how do you think facebook's publicity options match up? it drives me crazy that I can make my profile public to "everyone in my network" (which is a large set of people I don't know and have no reason to trust) but not to "everyone on facebook" or indeed "everyone ever". What if networks were smaller: ("chiark", "MondayPizza") ?? (How might you go about approving new members to the network? Surely everyone /in/ the network would want to (be able to) be notified about new members if they were to be able to read their public posts?)

muh.

[hatam-soferet.livejournal.com]

Well, I like friendslocking because it means I can run one blog which keeps both friends and clients in the loop without having to turn my life into a soap opera. I post a lot of stuff under friendslocks that my clients don't need to read, and a lot of stuff under subsetted friendslocks that certain of my friends don't need to read. I wouldn't achieve that by locking to arbitrary communities.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I restrict posts very rarely, but I do for:
- not wanting to talk about health stuff entirely publicly
- sometimes not wanting to talk about relationship stresses entirely publicly

This in a context where my journal is very definitely not linked to my real name, as my professional online presence has my name all over it and I want my journal to be a safe place for the whining about work.

I can also sympathise with, but have yet to actually do, the motivation of "I would like (person A and B|all my other friends) to help me arrange something nice for person C which person C will not see in advance".

[nameandnature]

You'd need to be careful with the "everyone except blah" options if "everyone" also implied "the general public". A site with that option would make to make it clear that this wasn't a security option, merely a way of preventing people from seeing stuff which might disturb them, say (what folk call "triggering", although I find that term irksome). Even then, users would probably misunderstand, with hilarious consequences.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed. It would have to be "some subset, except blah", or "a tag people have the option to exclude if they like". You might be able to set up a tag/filter of the latter kind and specify who's in by default (eg. so you can leave out people you know won't be interested), but it'd have to be clearly different to the security restrictions. Or indeed, hilarity would ensue :)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Friends locking is critically important to me.

Filtering posts is useful but non essential.

Friends Locking

[douglas-reay.livejournal.com]

*grins* Your above question may be eliciting an interesting in-built bias, on the grounds that it is similar to asking people "How many secret lives do you have that you do not with to reveal to some sub-set of your friends?". Those with more need for friend locking are likely to be shyer / more secretive / etc and therefore less likely to give you an accurate answer to your question.

Re: Friends Locking

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:)

(Though it's probably ok for a general idea.)

[senji.livejournal.com]

My policy is clearly outlined in my profile.