A brief overview of how Connections work in Hubzilla. Since Hubzlla allows both public and private content, the permissions are a bit more complicated than a public-only platform, like Mastodon. The following table is written from your perspective.
| Type of Connection | Send Notifications To Them |
Receive Notifications From Them |
View Each Other's Public Posts |
You Can View Their Private Posts |
They Can View Your Private Posts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Connection (Two Way Follow) | |||||
| You Follow Them (One Way) | |||||
| They Follow You (One Way) |
It should be noted that when we say "private posts" we mean private posts they are allowed to see. Since you can set individual permissions on every post, people won't see all of your private posts, just ones they have permission to see.
Send Notifications = They receive notifications of your posts and can view it in their inbox/stream.
Receive Notifications = You receive notifications of their posts and can view it in your inbox/stream.
View Public Posts = They can see your public posts in a variety of ways, including visiting your website or posts being repeated (boosted), being shared (quote post), or appearing in someone else's conversation as a comment or reply. Note: Even if you block someone from interacting with you, there are a number of ways people can still see your public posts.
View Their Private Posts = You are authorized to view their private posts. If you do not follow them, you will have to visit their website and sign on with OpenWebAuth to see the posts.
View Your Private Posts = They are authorized to view your private posts. If they do not follow you, they would have to visit your website and sign on with OpenWebAuth to see the posts.