Good morning Fediverse. It's another "wouldn't it be nice if actors worked?" kind of day.

Anyway, let's take a look at how Mastodon ActivityPub makes Group Actors less useful. First for my purposes, a Group Actor is something simple (push only):

• It has a list of members that corresponds to their followers = following list. If someone follows the Group actor, the Group actor follows them back. If someone unfollows the Group actor, the Group actor unfollows them back.
• If a follower addresses something to the Group actor, the Group actor announces it.

So what's the problem? Well if you are using Mastodon and its way of addressing, you cannot create a post addressed to the Group actor and not addressed to your followers.

So if for example you want to post in the embarrassing group: CowTippingBrags, you will also share the post with all your followers. That's BAD! That's WRONG! That's MORTIFYING!

Finally, I have no idea how easy this is to fix in Mastodon (or other projects). It should be trivial, but ... y'all know software. Same goes for replying to a post addressed to the group: Don't add the followers collection.