Mention users in comment

For the scope issues Jonne brought up, what are the rules for resharing? Would it be possible to auto-reshare (the post) when mentioning so that the mention-ee (my imaginary word for the person being mentioned) would be guaranteed access.

I'm not familiar with how re-shares work though (only allowed on public posts maybe?) but even a minimal impl of only allowing mentions where re-shares are possible would be a step forward, right?

Reshares are only allowed for public posts. If it's a limited post it cannot be reshared since that would violate the privacy that the original poster has set for the post.

If anyone feels like wanting to develop this feature I think we should have a quick vote first on how to do it :)

How about only allowing mentions in comments of other people who have posted a comment on that post (or of the person who posted the original post)? That way you could alert someone that you were responding to their comment, and wouldn't have the problem of privacy leak.

So:
- Mentions in posts of people whom you have placed in an aspect.
- Mentions in comments of the person who posted the post to which your comment is attached, or of people who have already commented on that thread.

That should avoid problems. It's a limited functionality, but is better that introducing privacy leaks and shouldn't introduce difficult database issues.

How does that sound?

@goob, yep that would certainly work and would implement some of the functionality without introducing hard to solve problems due to decentralization.

@Goob the problem is, users will not understand that and will always complain that mention is broken.

And, second, when the user is commenting on the post too, he has a notification anyway, so mention is not really useful here. Personally, I will use it when I read a post which can interested someone but I think this person will not have this post in his stream, so I mention him to show him something which can interest him.

So I am in favor of mention for everyone in public posts for the moment, I think it's there that it is really useful.

In a different social network (that is not federating yet) I use mentioning as the tool to expand a private posting/discussion to more people.

I am not quite sure if this would be even possible in the architecture of private postings in Diaspora*. But to be honest, everyone who can read a posting is always able to copy and paste this posting to his/her aspects or even public. But if the user is doing so, the discussion is split in two, which is quite annoying, too. And since there might be usecases for expanding the private group of the posting, I would simply allow this feature if it is technically possible.

I'm afraid I disagree, Rasmus. Once a privacy level has been set, it would not be good practice for someone to be able to retrospectively widen the visibility. For example, if you had made a post just to your close friends aspect, and I was in that aspect and commented on it (perhaps giving some private information), and you later made the post public, that would be a bad privacy breach. It's that sort of thing that Diaspora was set up to avoid (among some other things, of course).

@rasmusfuhse I think you went into a fallacy there. While it's true that you can just copy & paste something to distribute it further, that's not intentional, it just can't be prevented. It's no feature. And it really is no feature to widen the audience, that's just the effect it can has. On the other hand if we allow mentions in comments that is a feature, a thing that should work, something your meant to be doing, are encouraged to do. That's not the case with copy-pasting, that has a way higher mental barrier.

That one is possible doesn't justify the other. Not at all.

If it isn't intended to be able to widen the audience of a private posting, that's okay. Then it would be consequent to not allow mentions in comments of private postings.

So, what to we decide, allow mention in comment only for public post, like reshare ?