@hoergen Hmmm, maybe I’m all off here, but … this somehow feels like a problem that has been solved in the past, and be that as simple as in e-mail: Sending messages to a wide load of recipients with all of them in Cc (because I want to discuss issues with all of them), anyone who responds to any of these messages will send this response to all of the original recipients, and that is intentionally and expected to be this way. If someone modifies the set of recipients - fine, of course everyone’s able and allowed to do that, that’s a conscious decision, but it’s not, like “no matter what - your response will only be seen by those people in that recipient list that have you in their address book”… . Maybe this analogy is a bit difficult, but at least that’s a kind of behaviour that, for an addressing as generic as “Following”, would somehow be not all too much off.

@hypolite Ah dang, all along the lines I was kind of afraid it would boil down to something like that. 😔
@hoergen

@hoergen Hmmm, I don’t see the problem here to be honest. I don’t _want_ to explicitely add people to a particular group or forum. I just actually would like to be able to send out posts avoiding they’re visible to _everyone_ globally, either by looking at some “explore” timeline or by knowing a link to a post. I’d like to make a restriction that limits posts to be available to people _I_ follow (or maybe mutuals of _mine_) without enforcing that these people necessarily have to follow each other too to reach each others posts. The latter might be perfectly valid but it seems a different use case at least to me.

@hoergen Forum / group seems similar but unrelated; in this case, don’t I need everyone I would like to address to be in that group / on that forum then?

@feb (While I generally agree…: We still should be very cautious suggesting that, unless we know things don’t just wor a bit but actually work _well_. Currently, federation and communication across different pieces of software all too often feels fragile and incomplete especially whenever moving deeper into the specialties and unique features of a particular platform that might be poorly or totally unsupported on others. At the moment, I’m running into this virtually every other day even between “older” and somewhat similar platforms like pixelfed and Mastodon. Not even sure about how lemmy or kbin fits into this picture. And every user disappointed by how things work is a likely candidate for the next surveillance capitalist / walled garden monopoly to harvest and build upon.😶)