[feature] client support for Local-Only Posting

[sgrigson]

Is your feature request related to a problem ?

While it raises the question of which existing UI even supports local posts, it would still be nice to support this feature, especially for nascent island networks. In those scenarios, there's a great many occasions when messaging only your own server is desirable.

Describe the solution you'd like.

A mechanism (maybe keyed to how the Glitch fork of Mastodon does it, I'm not sure Hometown does it the same) to mark a post Local-Only, so it will not federate at all beyond the current server.

Glitch allows you to flag a post as local-only one of two ways:

• With a dropdown option in the UI for "Local Only"
• Using the 👁emoji somewhere in your post

In the case of the latter, that would allow us to make a post local-only without a UI feature.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

None

Additional context.

No response

[Fastidious]

Is this something that existing clients (not the front-ends of the ActivityPub servers you mentioned) support?

[tsmethurst]

Ello ello, on main we support local only posting by setting the local_only variable to boolean true when a status is created via the client API, since that seemed to be what Glitch used. It's also possible to do exactly the same thing on 0.16.0 by setting the federated flag to boolean false, though this latter method is deprecated. So on main, and in the upcoming 0.17.0 release, any client that can support that Glitch feature should be able to work with GoToSocial as well.

Re: the eyeball thing, we briefly considered it in this issue -- #301 -- but essentially we're wary of having "magic" emojis do things and would rather avoid that if possible.

[sgrigson]

Thanks! That's helpful to know that it's so close (and in some ways already here.)

Outside of the scope of this particular ticket, but I do wonder about the UI issue a lot more for handling interaction policies.

[VyrCossont]

Glitch doesn't use a local_only param: the dropdown option in its frontend just appends the magic emoji 👁️ to the post source before submitting. Tested on my Glitch 4.3-ish instance just now and checked against their current source.

Hometown does use a local_only param, I think; their docs are here. I don't have a Hometown test instance so I can't confirm that 100% and this is based on a quick read of their status create API handler just now (and also a previous look I did in #1985 and then forgot). To complicate things, it also supports magic emoji and a magic string.

[tsmethurst]

Ahh okay, I was just confusing glitch and hometown I think, thanks for the clarification.

[VyrCossont]

Well, it doesn't matter much, because there are no third-party clients that support local_only except possibly for Tusker on iOS (personally unconfirmed but the Hometown docs mention it).

Issues for adding it to our recommended clients:

• "Local only" visibility tuskyapp/Tusky#3198
• Local-only posts feditext/feditext#291

[sgrigson]

I'd also recommend seeing if it can be added to Elk/Phanpy, as both are pretty popular UI alternatives (and the latter in particular works very well with GTS).

Even so, as a Feditext user on mobile, this will be nice. Thanks!

[VyrCossont]

@sgrigson Elk and Phanpy don't seem to support it today, but the Phanpy developer is fairly open to new features, at least. (I'm not familiar with the Elk devs yet.) Feel free to open issues with those projects politely requesting support for local_only posts and point them back here. (already opened) IIRC they use the same Fedi client lib anyway?

[VyrCossont]

Phanpy already has one open:

• Local posts support for other fediverse backends cheeaun/phanpy#784

[VyrCossont]

And so does Elk:

• Hometown's local-only posts elk-zone/elk#1221

[Steffo99]

@VyrCossont I've already added support for local-only posting for Akkoma and Pleroma to Phanpy (cheeaun/phanpy#657), adding it for GtS shouldn't be a problem either, but I need to know how it will be implemented, since every fedi backend seems to have slightly different semantics for what they mean by Local-only!

[VyrCossont]

@Steffo99 oh cool, I didn't know you were a Phanpy contributor! So for GtS 0.17:

• optional local_only bool param when creating a status
• statuses returned from the API now have a local_only boolean field: https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/blob/main/internal/api/model/status.go#L50
• we don't have edits yet but I'm guessing you won't be able to change that after creating a post
• I think that's it

I believe Akkoma adds another visibility level for local-only posts instead of an orthogonal flag, so it won't work like Akkoma.

This should get you compatible with Hometown as well, but not Glitch, unless someone finally gets the local_only posting param merged.