Are relationship statuses public? If thatโs the case, itโs a disaster in the making.
Discussion
Why so? Follow and mute lists are already public.
โOh, weโre not friends anymore?!โ
People may already think that if they are unfollowed ๐คท๐ปโโ๏ธ this is already a problem
Unfollow doesnโt mean much. But if youโre setting and changing status on people, and everyone can see what you consider them as, this is like high school popularity contest but 1000x worse
Aren't lists public too?
And? A follow list doesnโt say much about your relationship to someone. A status says a lot if itโs visible to all.


Thanks? Iโm not sure what reaction youโre expecting from showing me my mute listโฆ
That was the topic of the thread, wasn't it? How is a public list of mutes different from publicly labeling an npub as muted?
I was referring to relationship status indicators being a bad idea. Not really sure what parent note means about getting rid of mute lists; thatโs why I followed up with โhow do we mute people?โ
They can be public and they can be private. This comes down to how the clients choose to implement them while following the specification.
- public association to pubkey, public clear text data
- public association to pubkey, private encrypted data
- public association to pubkey, with a mix of clear text data and encrypted data
etc
In the case of Corny Chat petnames, I went with making it known the relationship was public, but the actually assigned petname is private.
Yes, they can be either/or. Which one makes sense depends upon the type of client.
I think Vitor wanted this for health care data, so patient:doctor should probably be private.
But Alex wants them to define community membership, and then it might make sense to make them public, so that the other members can see who is in the community. Especially, if the relationship events stay on a dedicated community relay.
Lists are already public. If I take someone off the "Cool Dev Absolutely Fave Must Read" list and put them on the "Gives me the ick" list, I don't see how that's different. ๐
And you can make all of your categories private, if you care.
At any rate, I linked the spec in the OP. Just read it, yourself, instead of jumping in with both feet to bitch.