Mastodon: Mutual following agreements

[ghost]

I would like it if Mastodon could facilitate mutual following agreements, so that either side of the relationship can pull the plug if need be. I see this working in a similar way to locked accounts.

When someone follows a person with a mutual only account, a confirmation dialog would be shown that asks if they accept a follow back, then it's up to the person being followed to accept this on their end, and a mutual only relationship is created. Likewise, if either side unfollows, then both sides unfollow.

I'm asking for this because I empathise with people too much, when someone is in a bad place it generally changes my mood significantly too. I don't mind this at all if I know that they have my back, but sadly I find myself putting in a lot of emotional effort for people who no longer follow me back.

[trwnh]

this sounds similar to a "friend request" model as opposed to a follower model. i'm not sure to what extent it makes sense for mastodon's current model, but it would require some additional bits to keep track of which relationships are mutual-only (unidirection) relation and which are a classical follow/follower (bidirectional) relation

[Cassolotl]

This sounds like a great idea. I bet a lot of folks would be into this!

[Cassolotl]

Related to Ask for a new privacy level : "mutuals" #7135, which has been requested a few times over the years.

[irlcatgirl]

On one hand I like the idea of a mutuals label, on the other hand it encourages childish behavior "You unfollowed me jerk, so I'm unfollowing you back!" as if its a game rather than a platform for civil discourse. I've seen too many people on Twitter using "unfollow bots" that call people out for unfollowing them.

[ghost]

This isn't a game to me, this isn't a platform for civil discourse to me, its a way to make and keep in touch with friends and build communities.

It just happens that the way you want to use Mastodon is painful and distressing for me.

[Cassolotl]

On one hand I like the idea of a mutuals label, on the other hand it encourages childish behavior "You unfollowed me jerk, so I'm unfollowing you back!" as if its a game rather than a platform for civil discourse.

That makes sense if it's a manual unfollow, but when it's automated and clearly marked as such I see no reason to think that people would be weird about it in a different way from any other unfollow.

Like, when I joined Facebook way back, I was just getting the hang of it and I found my friend's profile and asked why I couldn't see any of their posts. They told me that I had to send a friend request, and then they'd accept it, and then we could see all of each other's stuff. It was implied that if one of us unfriended we'd lose each other's stuff. It was no big deal. (I have no idea whether Facebook is still like this, but that's what it was like when I joined it! It was about 12 years ago I think.)

So yeah, it's just that with some people you'd have a mutual understanding that you follow each other or you don't see each others' posts. Obviously people can be petty bitches to each other with any feature, but I don't think this feature request would be an abuse vector in a way that would make it not worth installing. You can't control whether people use your platform for being a jerk or for civil discourse.

[AnnaLibertas]

I dont have anything against a friending based/reciprocal social model as opposed to a following/asymmetric model, but I do think the two are somewhat mutually exclusive? Both from a technical and a user perspective I think trying to support both models would result in a fairly prohibitive level of complexity

[trwnh]

I do think the two are somewhat mutually exclusive? Both from a technical and a user perspective

as far as technical goes, activitypub is based around the Follow model, it uses inbox and outbox for delivery, just like email. there are some projects that want to do a Offer Relationship model, but no actual implementations yet and nothing past the planning phase. not to mention that they would be largely incompatible with the existing Follow-based fediverse unless they also implemented Follow semantics as a fallback.

from a UX perspective you would just have to do separate tracking of "friends" and "followers", kind of like how facebook lets you unfollow your friends (although that's probably more similar to a mute)