Mention users in comment

I'd say what Goob wrote some way below

• Mentions in posts of people whom you have placed in an aspect.
• Mentions in comments of the person who posted the post to which your comment is attached, or of people who have already commented on that thread.

This way for sure technically it can be done. I don't think "users will not get it" is a good excuse to not introduce wanted functionality.

so if i find a public post written by somebody i don't share with and i want to point it to you, will i be able to mention you in comment?

I don't think you can even mention people not in your aspects when creating posts. How would the pod know who to suggest?

But you are in my aspect. The creator of the post is not in.

@jasonrobinson Right now you can mention people in an post using the @. I'm not perfectly sure how it works, as it's for example possible to share to an aspect and mention someone not in that aspect.

If we're going to implement mentions in comments, I propose that we do it this way:

• You can mention anyone in your aspects or anyone of those who have already has commented.
• If the original post isn't shared with that person, then the mentionlink is coloured, for instance red. When clicking "Comment" a dialogue is shown, telling you that this person cannot show the post. If you click Comment Anyway, the mention just turns into an ordinary MarkDown link to the mentioned users profile, and the users don't get any notification.

Then we have no privacy leaks and the ability to mention people! The only thing is that you could use the feature to figure out which of your contacts that belongs to which of the other persons aspects. Don't know if that's a problem though.

I'm afraid I disagree with that, Ivan.

I don't think there is any benefit in @-mentioning someone if they are not going to get notification and will not be able to read the post or their mention. That sounds like a sort of reverse privacy leak - you're giving other people, who that person might not know, knowledge of their existence with a link to their details. I think that's a bad idea.

The only workable (technically, and from a privacy point of view) solution seems to me to be @-mentioning people only who are already part of that conversation.

From a privacy point of view, you could also add:
- people in your aspects, for a public post.
- people in your aspects and who are also in the aspects to which this post has been shared by the original poster, for limited posts.

But I suspect this would create enormous problems regarding federation and so on. The benefit would not outweigh the problems, from my point of view.

That's true, you certainly have a point. But the ability to see peoples' profiles is already some kind of privacy leak. Sure, you give away the knowledge of their existence, but as all profiles are public then doing so without the use of mentions is not super-duper-hard. Nothing prevents you, it's just to type examplepod.com/u/username and you're done. But yeah in reverse it's kind of an privacy leak, as this feature makes it easier.

I say the problem lays with the non-anonymity of the profiles. You can only prevent your profile to pop up in the diaspora search bar, not stay anonymous. So there are two alternatives if we want to keep our privacy standards:

1. We could implement mentions for the ones that has already commented on a post.

2. We could update how the profiles work and include mentioning all people that's in your aspects too (maybe we should a new loomio discussion about that?)

As the user agreed if they want to be searchable or not, we can simply check that, no ?

I think we should allow this feature maybe with some restriction but it's to bad to not have it only for really few weird use cases..

If it's possible to @mention people in comments who are in your aspects, and you @-mention someone who isn't involved in a discussion, it also gives away to anyone who sees that that they have a connection to you.

In practical terms, this might not be a problem in many instances, but no one is supposed to be able to see who is connected to whom in Diaspora, and by allowing comment-mentions of people in aspects, we're breaking the 'promise' that connections will not be revealed. It's a matter of principle rather than practical safety.

@goob You're perfectly right, I too mentioned this earlier but I dunno if you saw it. Mentioning in this way in a limited post also lets you know exactly which people in your aspects that belongs to any of the aspects that the poster posted to. So, if we want to stay cool and keep our fantastic privacy with the aspects, I guess there's only one solution left. Luckily it isn't a bad solution at all.

If we look at when people actually use mentioning right now, it is to get someone in the discussion's attention, not to link to another persons profile. So if we implement the function just like that, like @goob already proposed a long way down the page, there would be no privacy leaks, as you don't need to have a connection to those people, and no one would be unsure why not all people can be mentioned, hopefully ;)

Are we BTW ready to create some kind of proposals and start the decision-taking process?