Ability to privatize existing toots from profile page without deleting them

[fluffy-critter]

Pitch

Sometimes you really need to be able to remove stuff from your public profile without deleting the posts. While it's impossible at a protocol level to remove/depublicize a toot from peoples' inboxes, there's still a lot of value in being able to hide things that were previously posted, without necessarily deleting them and the conversations that are associated with them.

Motivation

This would be akin to a Twitter account going locked/private, and is very necessary in a lot of cases of safety, for example someone being actively attacked/stalked (e.g. Gamergate/Kiwifarms/etc.), or someone needing to hide prior toots from a potential employer or other social media stalker without completely nuking their account from orbit.

This would effectively be the same as retroactively setting the toots to be "followers-only," with the caveat that anyone who has seen it on their timeline will still probably have access to it. While it would be impossible to scrub a toot entirely from other peoples'/instances' memories, it's still incredibly useful for issues of safety and hiding stuff from non-Mastodon users.

[trwnh]

You can't really do anything about the copies of the post that you've already delivered to other servers, but yes you can still affect whether the public page is visible and whether you require auth to fetch it via URI or outbox. I think there was a "bunker mode" idea floating around at one point that would do something similar.