Why not just have standard groups, you say? Well we need those too (and they are coming to the fediverse in various places), but this is a bit different: you can address a post to several circles at once, rather than post it only in the context of one group ; and ideally circle names and members are known only to the OP. Its a privacy and sanity preservation feature....
You could create lists of people (eg. IRL friends / colleagues / shitpost buddies / etc) that you could address particular posts to (or even say 'post to all followers except colleagues').
In Mastodon terms, the dropdown that has Public / Followers-only / Direct options would additionally have each of your circles. Effectively this would work like a group DM, except without having to @ mention (and posts would appear in the feed, not notifications).
In ActivityPub pub terms instead of the 'public' flag or followers Collection being addressed, it could address it directly to each circle member's actor, or to a Collection that represents them. Still need to think through how the list of members could be private (they wouldn't be public, but may need to be knowable to their members so that replies can be addressed, or maybe we just go further and have a Group actor for each circle).
I like that it seems to be optimized for fast instance switching, and that it can show different timelines from more than one instance simultaneously. Really neat!
People that take the Glasgow-Edinburgh train have developed this anarcho-communist ticket sharing economy and I love it. It's because return tickets cost literally only 10 pence more than a single, so people just buy returns and leave the other ticket at the station they arrive at.
It's fucking beautiful and more folk need tae know about it
@dredmorbius@liw Well that's an unfortunate software implementation flaw. In terms of cost, it's much cheaper buying your own memory than paying Apple's crazy overinflated margin.
if you, like me, are a computer nerd cliché who likes to spend all day sat in a chilly dark cave with blackout curtains drawn staring at an array of glowing panels, (and you're old,) darkreader will help your eyeballs to not explode when you visit a site with a bright background
@cstanhope That's closer, because it's using the "open source" label to try to make itself seem like Linux despite its much smaller developer base who could disappear in the blink of an eye if the company decides to stop developing it.
Or maybe we just need to shift the conversation to be about the community around a piece of software. "Community-developed software" perhaps?