Despite the fact that Backdrop today is an invite-only professional network, posts are visible to anyone with the link. There are two reasons for that:

We don’t want to limit the connections that can happen

The ultimate goal of a professional network, in our opinion, is to facilitate opportunities for its members. The private nature of Backdrop is in service of that, because it helps us keep signal high and do things that don’t scale as we build out the rest of the product and protocol. So it’s not about keeping information private, and in fact allowing posts to be seen outside of the network means that you can do things like share them with someone that’s not a member yet.

More members are joining every day

Let’s say that we did keep posts private, and you posted something that you only wanted existing members of the network to see. That would assume that you trust us to only let people in that you would also be comfortable seeing that information. That assumption can make sense for communities with strictly enforced norms around privacy, but that’s not how we see Backdrop long-term. Our ultimate aim is to build a sufficiently decentralized professional network, which means ultimately adding a lot of people to the network. While we do absolutely envision private spaces and sub-communities being part of that network, that’s out of scope of the current posts feature.