æʃliŋ, ring racers purropawgandist @aescling@cat.family

@MindmeshLink you LOVE to see it

@noracodes what’s the roast?

@MindmeshLink -patpat-

@noracodes well, i hope you have a good rest of your morning

@MindmeshLink what the absolute fuck, how dare u

@MindmeshLink that's gay

@MindmeshLink sorry, i should have said GREAT taste

@MindmeshLink good taste

@MindmeshLink i don’t know that you’re referring to but i’m sure it was a good post

@MindmeshLink is this the dialectic

@tully @packbat there already exist AP software that uses circles; that’s why mastodon introduced the limited visibility at all

@netkitty ​

@packbat anyway this does mean mastodon is a bit of hacking away from having circles in some form

(though making a good UI and just overall UX fur this is purrobably nontrivial)

@packbat the API docs don’t even mention this! but if you try it, it works! not that it’s useful!!

@packbat since october 2018 there has been a FIFTH, undocumented, status visibility, the limited visibility, which was introduced to honor the visibility of google+ circles, which some mastodon-compatible software allows (and which is purrfectly allowed by the AP specs); explicitly mentioned users can see the post, but it’s not viewed as a DM. (the ability to have “silent” (that is, non-notifying) mentions was introduced at the same time so that you don’t necessarily ping everybody who can see the post)

fur some reason, such posts are shown to users as “private” visibility, even though that is not really correct

now the absolutely wild part is that the status creation API endpoint will just let you try to create a limited visibility post!! but that’s pretty useless, because there is no way to create silent mentions from that endpoint; you would have to ping everybody you wanted to see the post anyway as if it were a DM