jack: (Default)
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.

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