Numbered accounts and secret RSS

[charmian]

It would be interesting if DW were like a true RSS service and you could subscribe to others nonpublicly. (True nonpublicity: your subscriber list doesn't show up in the profile, people who you subscribe to are not notified, your /read page is not publicly visible, not visible in the directory) In other words, they wouldn't know that you subscribed to them, and no one else would know. In some ways the subscription model is helpful in aiding discovery. Yet in other ways, why is it anyone's business who I subscribe to? For the publicizing of the access list, there is a substantial reason (although some do not agree) as to why it should be publicized. Not so for the subscriber list.

Hmm... maybe it could work as having a sub-journal that could be nonpublic (similar to the numbered account suggestion on the wiki), and one aspect of the nonpublicness is that the subscribe list is entirely nonpublic.

The numbered account suggestion is IMHO pretty interesting, and I can't see any reason why it shouldn't be implemented, except doesn't it violate one of the reasons for the visibility of the access list? In other words, if I grant a numbered account access, it probably shouldn't show up on my profile. However, that would seem to violate the principle that the access list must be visible so that other people on my access list can see who else might be able to see locked posts. I suppose one way to deal with it must be to specify that a numbered account cannot be granted access (and if the only way a numbered account could exist was as a subaccount of a paid account, that could work, because people who want to grant the person who owns the main account access would grant the main account access.) However this is now getting really confusing.

Comments

[torachan]

Well, presumably subscribing in the manner you suggest would be only for unlocked journals/comms, since otherwise if you are granted access, you're showing on their access lists and thus it's no longer private. So if it's only for unlocked posts, you could just subscribe by RSS. Yeah, it means you have to use a separate service instead of everything on your DW page, but it's something.

[charmian]

Definitely, but more convenient to use something on the same service, if possible. Also, a lot of people make their feeds title only.