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Who groups hit the , won't they just be like big DMs with a name?

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@realcaseyrollins Initially, I suspect they’ll be like DMs with fewer tagged users visible, but there’s a lot of room to play with the concept in the ActivityPub model — I think what it will eventually be depends on our glorious frontend devs.

@realcaseyrollins I think this is backwards actually. Groups should've been the underlying addressing mechanism, with DM conversations (a group of two people) and follower-only posts (a group where only the admin has send privileges) as special cases.

@khird Or DMs would just be two-person, invite-only groups. Then you could name your chat, like I do with my brother in .

@realcaseyrollins right. Once you've built the group infrastructure, creating UI candy to make certain use cases (e.g. DM, followers-only) more accessible would be straightforward. But having already implemented the special cases independently, retrofitting groups into the standard, in a way that's compatible with existing servers and clients, seems to be quite a pain.

Groups are more like chatrooms and have always been in the fediverse. OK, there was a little stretch between 2009 and 2010 when they didn't federate very well. But I think you're describing aspects (privacy lists, circles, collections, whatever) more than groups. Those are essentially mailing lists, which we've had since the 70s and again the continuity was only interrupted for a brief period from 2008-2009 because OStatus offered no privacy.

Every new generation that arrives in the fediverse tends to throw out or ignore everything that came before and then spends a few years re-inventing it.
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