Privacy here shouldn't come with such a painful social cost. You shouldn't have to either choose social isolation, or be forced to accept that your posts will be ingested by shady web scrapers or risk helping a known dangerous stalker identify your physical location.
You should be able to create posts that can be interacted just like the completely public ones, but which are only visible to your followers and maybe their followers, or other group of your choice.
Current #Mastodon privacy options
Public: Find new friends, but also allow your violent ex to find and stalk you.
Quiet public: Allow the violent ex to still find and stalk you, but reduce your chances of finding new friends. BTW, the ex doesn't even need an account.
Followers: Absolutely DESTROY your chances of finding new friends. Also make some current followers more likely to miss your post, because others can't boost it.
Specific people: For direct messages only.
It seems to me that it wouldn't be that hard to accomplish this at the client level, at the cost of a lot of gibberish posts in your vanilla timeline that would need to be managed on the server, I think, to keep the public feed usable to the punters.
Supplementary accounts could be setup maybe, with the client integrating the two feeds on the front end.
It's doable anyways, without needing Mastodon's active cooperation. Lots of details, like, you'd need more than 500 chars for sure.
@nen
>but which are only visible to your
>followers and maybe their followers,
[your ex creating fake account with cat pictures and following your friends].
Unsolvable problem unless you have "provide your real-world id to register", which comes with way more problems than your ex.
Also: requiring login to read public things is abhorrent dark pattern, screw it sideways.
@tyx It's difficult to solve only if you have lost your anonymity and can't switch to a new anonymous account. You could also gradually expand your visibility by adding people to a custom privacy list one by one. It's more work, but then you can remain in control of the risks associated with increased visibility.
No, this has nothing to do with dark patterns.
@nen
> It's difficult to solve only if you have lost your anonymity and can't switch to a new anonymous account.
That's exact your scenario with stalking ex, isn't it? Your ex knows who you are and you haven't changed your account (otherwise how'd she follow you?).