chalcedony_starlings | [(−) s0] Security reminder

Anything posted here with sensitivity level 2 (Private) must not be repeated or replied to by any less-restrictive channel, as a baseline. Explicit permission overrides this.

To repeat the sensitivity level list from our profile:

s0: Public. Link/quote freely.
s1: Unlisted. Use some discretion and don't broadcast too far.
s2: Private. Ask before repeating things to others.

A “c” (compartment) tag is a hint to be aware that only part of our circle is trusted with ~~enough~~ the right kind of discretion, shared context, or some similar characteristic for things in that compartment. Compartments are tagged using code names; the mapping is defined in this post [s1]. “s1 + compartment” means that the definition of discretion should take the compartment into account, but the content itself is not all that sensitive. “s2 + compartment” is the most restrictive.

The easiest way is to keep everything within the same thread, thus giving it the same visibility as the parent post; if you're reading here, that's the natural thing to do anyway. If you want to take things elsewhere, you have to be much more careful. In particular, Mastodon's visibility model (added: and Twitter's) can lead to surprising and damaging consequences for anything non-public.

Always feel free to ask first (added: privately, of course) if you're not sure.

Places where feedback might be useful:

Currently, we assign compartment access heuristically when inducting people into our access lists, rather than requiring explicit opt-ins, on the grounds that being careful with private-group communication is something people already need to know how to do, and often these people already have a history of being willing to engage on related matters. Dealing with “they don't want to read about that now” is handled using topic tags and cuts. Should we move to requiring explicit opt-ins for everything? If so, should that be applied retroactively?

Suggestions are also invited re making this easier to read/understand/deal with, ideally without: (a) causing the subject line to stretch to infinity, adding verbose preambles which people will get tired of reading, or similar; (b) removing or greatly impeding our ability to show most things to only some people, and different things to different sets of some people; (c) requiring us to impute a bunch of implicit obligation to people (haven't fully unpacked this part); etc. etc.

… anything else that occurs to you, with slightly more caution. Figuring out how to deal with what seems from here to be a reasonable set of social needs, when relevant digital implications have ~no habitual penetration, is an ongoing problem, and there's presumably a lot we can't see.