I’ve noticed this before but for some reason only now took notice of it. Over on Medium, when viewing responses the default is to show only “in-network” responses, by which I assume they mean only responses posted by users you follow. To see more, you have to click to “show out-of-network responses”.
This got me to thinking again about my hypothetical dun.bar social network, wherein you’d only be able to follow 150 people (you’d have two timelines: a feed of the people you follow, and a feed of the people they follow).
What if the default view of any replies on dun.bar aped the Medium view: you only see replies (not just on your posts; on anyone’s) from the 150 people you follow. You’d have to click to see replies from the people they follow.
I guess the general idea behind dun.bar would be that you’ve opted-in to reading the posts of 150 people, and the next level-of-trust out from that is trusting the judgment of those 150 people in terms of who they’ve opted-in to reading. So your default view is your judgement, and then the optional view at every step is the judgement of your follows.
What would it be like to read and post on a social network which anyone could join, but no one actually has ready access to everyone else? Where the links between and amongst people, as much as possible, arise out of their own deliberate judgments?