INACTIVE@woozle One interesting approach is how Hubzilla handles this. Basically all contacts have a slider, and you can slide left or right based on how close that contact is to you personally, and you can always adjust it.
You then have a corresponding slider on your stream that filters your stream based on the same information. So you can filter to show only your best friends or family members, or go the other direction and see everybody.
Not the best UX, but it's the only approach I've seen.
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