Something that should theoretically be possible is maintaining separate collections of actors to address content to, and software should be able to handle that.
e.g., followers is a collection intrinsically managed by the protocol: Accept(Follow) adds that actor to the collection for your followers. (All follows on the fediverse are really follow requests, no matter what)
Like why can't I create a family collection or a close friends collection & share activities just with those actors through addressing?
I can also help remote servers by sending Add and Remove activities to indicate that I've updated those collections. (Maybe it'd be Accept(Add)? Or Undo(Accept(Add))? )
Would of course require activitypub servers to be aware of these additional collections in order to handle delivery correctly, but this feels like something that should exist but doesn't in mainstream fedi software.
I think only @bonfire implements this maybe?
@thisismissem @bonfire I think @noellabo ‘s fedibird masto fork has had this for a while
@thisismissem @django A link to the latest commit is posted on the top page of the site.
As of the time of this post it is here.
https://github.com/fedibird/mastodon/tree/a7a145781cd24cbcb27db6a2e7c19b29fd99fdf9
@thisismissem @django Fedibird's implementation is a remnant of the circle feature that was being implemented in Mastodon. Much of the code was implemented by Eugen and Claire, and about half was implemented by me.
Circle is a mechanism that creates a collection of a selection of followers and distributes (publishes) posts to specific accounts without explicitly mentioning them.
