All Purpose Privacy Filters

Carl Milsted, Jr on Apr 30 22:19:02

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Who gets to see your posts on Conntects?

You decide!

Alas, with Great Control comes many controls

The real question is how to keep the number of controls manageable. For example, we could give you a checklist of all your subscribers -- plus one for the general public, but that would get tedious very quickly for anyone who is remotely popular. The obvious solution would be to lump your followers into categories, but even that has problems.

The Problems with Categories

Suppose you had a social network where you could categorize your contacts: friends, family, fans, business contacts, etc. You quickly run into problems such as:

• You might have some friends who are close enough that you want to share pictures of your kids with.
• You might want to share some posts to your friends but not all of your family.
• You might have coworkers whom you consider to be friends.

Another way to categorize your followers could be by interest. Suppose you post on football, UFOs, flower arranging, and cat photos. You could categorize your followers by which of these subject they are interested in.

How do you deal with people who could fit in more than one of of these categories?

Behold, the Power of Parallel Channels!

Here is where Conntects gets weird, and powerful.

Instead of assigning a single category to each of your followers, you can assign each follower to any combination of up to eleven channels.

Then for each post you check which channels pertain to that post. (You also have the option of making the post public.)

If a follower has any channel match that of the post, the follower gets to see the post.

In the diagram above Phineas has written a post on UFO abductions of cats. His niece Delilah is not interested in UFOs, but she does like cats, so she gets to see the post.

Setting Up Your Channels

When you first join Conntects, your dashboard will remind you to name your privacy channels. The link will take you to a form which looks like this:

Phineas has opted to name his channels thusly:

Using Your Channels

When Delilah subscribed to Phineas, he was asked to manage his new subscriber:

In the Manage Subscriber window, Phineas got to assign which channels Delilah gets to see, as well as whether she can private message him.

Note: only the publisher gets to see the names of his or her channels. And subscribers do not get to see which channels they are assigned.

When Phineas writes his post on UFOs abducting cats, he gets to check which channels pertain to the post: