In a rare move, Facebook announced Thursday that it will ratchet down the amount of sharing users are defaulted into. Starting Thursday, status updates will no longer be shared to the public automatically; instead, they will be shared only to friends.

Facebook has made any items shared through the site available to the public since 2011, with more private settings available in a drop-down menu. Now that the company is starting to pay more attention to privacy and is trying to deal with users' News Feeds getting crushed under the weight of all the possible posts that can be fed to them, it seems to be recognizing the negatives of a default public share.

As we pointed out around Facebook's tenth anniversary, the ambiguity of sharing to a nebulous "public" tends to pressure people out of sharing. This phenomenon has led to the rise in messaging apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat, where users can share with a small, controlled group of friends, as well as anonymous sharing apps like Secret and Whisper. Turning down the level of sharing could theoretically encourage users to share more and make what they share more relevant to their audience.

Facebook acknowledged that mistaken sharing to too wide of an audience was also a factor. "We recognize that it is much worse for someone to accidentally share with everyone when they actually meant to share just with friends, compared with the reverse," Facebook stated in its blog post. The setting will be presented to users in a pop-up menu and will still offer the option of sharing publicly by default.