When JoeUser first started, we had the concept of audiences where we could have a friends list and decide who could see our posts.  This system became very database intensive once we decided, after the fact, to integrate blog posts and forum posts together to optimize the overall database performance.

The problem, however is that there are posts that one would make for family and friends and ones for the general public.  As I’ve learned the hard way since the change over, public scrutiny can be a pain.

For instance, everything from pictures of my house to my views on federal tax payer funded health insurance has started getting increasing scrutiny. 

To people on the outside, I seem to be becoming more of a public figure.  This has been hard to reconcile with the lifelong habit of seeing myself as someone who grew up pretty poor and being a fairly obscure software developer.  

So one of the features we’re bringing back is going to be the integration of posts being viewable by friends or public. You won’t be able to make the custom audiences per post anymore but at least you can decide whether that picture of your kid is something you want “the whole world” to see.

So if you’re noticing some of my posts being “gone” from this moment, it’s not that they’re gone, it’s that they’re only available to be read by friends and family.