audience

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audience is an experimental property of a post that indicates the intended recipients (readers) of the post.

Why

You may want to explicitly denote the audience of a post so that viewers of the post have a better understanding of who the post was written for, or perhaps who may see the post for non-public posts.

How to

The methods of publishing the audience of a post are still being figured out, along with any consuming code use-cases. See #Brainstorming until that's figured out.

Indieweb examples

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki has been occasionally publishing posts with an explicit audience, since 2017-03-22.

Eddie Hinkle

Eddie Hinkle occasionally publishes posts with an explicit audience since 2018-11-18.

  • Currently it's mostly been focused on posts written for online university classes like this post.
  • There are plans to also use this field to control access to private posts

Sven Knebel

Sven Knebel has implemented a prototype of AutoAuth. The audience for posts secured through it is a list of URLs, which the requesting token has to be obtained for.

Vincent Pickering

Vincent occasionally publishes posts with an explicit audience since 2019-03-07.

  • This is being used because my blog straddles a few different disciplines and I wanted users to understand which context I am speaking within.
  • Controlled by a simple frontmatter addition outputting the relevant tags

capjamesg

capjamesg added an "Assumed Audience" to his blog post on fixing the author card on his homepage h-feed. This section states:

Assumed knowledge: This post assumes technical knowledge with microformats2. This post is most useful for someone debugging authorship relations on their h-feed or for community members who want to discuss documenting this pattern.

The goal of this section was to be upfront about the technical nature of the post. The intended audience (people with technical knowledge of micrformats2) was first stated. Then, additional information was provided to say when the post may be useful. While this second point is not necessary, James thought it was useful context for further evaluating whether a post would be interesting before going to the main body of text.

Brainstorming

use-cases

posting only to a local timeline

audience property h-card

The audience property value is an h-card for the person or group that is the intended audience of an h-entry. See real world implementation of this proposal:

See also these for related prior work:

Questions

Synchronized audiences

Many systems have groups with membership, and if a member posts to a group the audience is automatically the group members. In an Indieweb example, this might be useful too: if I e.g. create an audience of "HWC Berlin attendees", other attendees should be able to easily post with the same audience. Ideas:

  • published (potentially access protected) lists of users, audience property refers to that
  • local list following a published list, asking for confirmation for changes
  • …?

Silo examples

Nextdoor

Choices are presented for where your posts go, between only your neighborhood, or a collection of local neighbourhoods.

Facebook

The platform allows one to prescribe a specific audience by using its friends list functionality. More details about the options can be found on their help page.

Twitter

When, part of a community, shows an audience label.

Sessions

See Also

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