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An interesting fediverse quirk. On Mastodon, you can change visibility midway through a comment thread.

This makes sense because Mastodon is a Twitter-like microblogging platform and each response is a post in its own right.

But this is a federal system and your toots may be going to something that isn’t Mastodon.

This, that you are reading now, is not a Mastodon post. It’s a Friendica post. Friendica is not Twitter-like; it’s Facebook-like. That means that a post includes all responses as comments on that post and not first class posts in their own right.

Which means you can’t, e.g., change the audience midway through a comment thread, even if the people you’re replying to are on Mastodon, because the idea of changing the visibility midway through a comment thread is absurd in Facebook-like parlance.

As different fediverse protocols become increasingly popular, we’re gonna have to het used to these quirks.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

@Sarah Brown Here's an explanation for #Hubzilla by its current main dev.

I guess #Friendica works similarly, also because Hubzilla is technically a Friendica fork by the same developer.

in reply to Jupiter Rowland

@Jupiter Rowland Indeed.

Interestingly, Elk, the mastodon web client, works with Friendica and it DOES allow the visibility change mid stream.

in reply to Sarah Brown

@Sarah Update: Turns out this feature is available on Friendica, but it's a preference setting that is well hidden (this is a weakness of Friendica. Its UI needs attention), and off by default.
in reply to Sarah Brown

@Sarah Also, @Elk supports markup when composing and viewing Friendica posts. Nice!