@khird In theory that sounds great, but in practice that isnt possible given how the ActivityPub and mastodon work..

If you send something as a direct message only the people you tag can see it. A group server works by a mechanism that is effectively a reboost of your original post, it just doesnt show as a boost because the client recognizes it was done by a group server and as such displays it differently, but behind the scenes it is still a boost.

As such you cant boost a direct message and even if you did it wouldnt matter because no one could see the boosted message other than the people you originally tag. Sosince a direct message has a permission of 1 (the person you tag) there is no way the group can share that with others.

@freemo That makes sense. Would anything prevent a group account from copy-pasting the content of my DM into a fresh message with follower-only permissions (and maybe prefixing it with "@khird" to identify the original speaker)?

@khird Nothing would prevent it per-se.. But there are a few concerns.. one would be a bad acting server that might impersonate people. The other issue is that it means you loose control over your post so redrafts or deleting cant be done anymore.

More importantly it would break the standard though and servers that already have some sense of groups and how they work wouldnt work with the new approach.

@freemo True -- I think a sufficiently smart group bot could respond appropriately to the original message being deleted, but yeah you'd have to trust the infrastructure you're using, and that includes the groups server.

Okay, so as things stand now, let's say I want to have a "group discussion" with some other people, who may not all mutually follow one another. What's the advantage to having everyone follow @beekeeping@groups.qoto.org and mention it in messages, versus having everyone subscribe to #BeekeepingGroupQOTO and use that tag? I'm just struggling to see the use case for this service.

@khird
Well more than just that. You would t even get replies to your post as notifications since the thread was recreated, for example.

Best solution might be to use a modified version of local-only posting whereby the original message is o
Public but only initially federates to the group

@khird
As to the advantage of a group over a hash tag.. 1) thr owner of the group moderates who can post to the group 2) you can only see hashtags from sources you federate with. Youll never see a post with a hashtag made by a lone server with no followers for example

@freemo Well I guess moderating who can post to the group is better than no control. I see your point about federation too - but the flip side is that the group server is vulnerable to fediblocks, crashes, etc. which give it more failure modes than hashtags. I'm interested to see how it gets used!

@khird Well the intention here isnt to replace hashtags.

Also keep if you want something that is the best of both hashtags and groups you can just hashtag all posts in a group with a hashtag for that group (in fact i can bake this in as an option where only posts with a certain hashtag get reboosted). This would mean since the group is just an account that reboosts when tagged that if the group server goes down all the original messages still exist in the fediverse and could still be found by their hash tag. so you would get the best of both.