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Since I seem to be talking about the deeply cursed ways visibility settings interact with replies, here's one more:
It makes discourse worse and more intense. That's the "fedi meta", if you prefer that term. It does this by forcing people to follow each other in hyper-connected relation graphs, just to be able to follow normal conversations.
It goes like this:
1. Someone you don't follow posts on followers-only. You can't see this post, and it doesn't affect you at all.
2. Someone you do follow replies to them. You might see this post, and it triggers curiosity and fomo.
3. Someone else you follow replies to the reply. You're very likely to see this, and it continues to trigger your curiosity and fomo.
4. You eventually follow the OP, just to have some idea what's happening.
Even if there was some reason you didn't already follow the OP. Even if they kind of annoy you. Because they keep winding up in the middle of conversations that seem like should be accessible to you, and not following them breaks that assumption.
well, this has exceeded my tolerance for the kind of replies I get when I talk about mastodon on mastodon. So, 
@jenniferplusplus so... if clients defaulted to "don't show me replies to follower-only posts by people I don't follow" (sounds verbose put like that!) it might be the right nudge at the cost of expanding social graphs, which is kind of OK if no-one's bonus depends on MAU?
@djm62 @jenniferplusplus In the past I have vaguely daydreamed how good it would be if that were a setting offered at the point of follow.
Edit: I mean, in my ideal world, I could choose, when I follow someone, whether to hide replies of theirs to people I do not follow.
@djm62 Yeah, I think so. Although it's computationally expensive to do that graph traversal all the time. The solution I would prefer is for replies to adopt the same visibility as the OP. So if you reply to OP's follower-only post, your post is visible to OP's followers, not yours.
@jenniferplusplus @djm62 Feels like it should be (possible to be) the intersection of everyone's in the reply chain's followers?
@jenniferplusplus @djm62 That seems... problematic? If I want to reply to you, and am cautious of making public posts, do I need to vet all of your followers (current and future) before I do?
@jenniferplusplus @djm62 Interesting. I think it probably changes the dynamics of replies. I wonder how a system like this would interact with quoting or linking.
You could also reply to Jennifer privately by clicking the little envelope (or whatever icon you have in your Fediverse service) to reply to Jennifer only. But to prove your point, yeah, even I did see your reply now, and Jennifer doesn’t even follow me.
@erbridge @jenniferplusplus @djm62
I like "show later posts only to people who could see the original post" as a solution!
If you really want to talk to [J] and not [J] and followers, there's already "mentioned people only".
If you want to talk to [J] and your followers, you could just not make it a reply: create a new followers-only post and mention [J] in it. Paste the OP link for context. That option also already exists.
@jenniferplusplus ah, that is better. I was kind of focused on "client side voluntary" versus "server side enforced" in thinking about it. I guess the flow of "reply visibly to everyone that follows OP who you haven't blocked and who haven't blocked you" is probably the least surprising behaviour
@jenniferplusplus @djm62 Re the first point. I'm building those sorts of controls in to #Pachli. Initial plans in https://pachli.app/pachli/2024/08/02/harassment-controls.html.
Notification controls landed in 2.9.0. I'm working on equivalent controls for conversations/direct messages now. I.e., hide / replace-with-warning DMs from accounts {I don't follow / are younger than 30d / are limited by server admins}.
Threads and the home timeline to come soon.
Feedback welcomed.
