I still think the best solution is a yellow status option that shows where you are but still needs to request if you want to go in unless someone else of your friends is in the same instance as green/blue
An existence of a yellow status will move a lot of people out of orange though. More options is just better for everyone
Why add them on your friends list if you want to avoid them that hard? Yellow status is still best. Yellow gang yellow gang we'll make it happen one day
If it's convenient for you to see others that are green then won't it be nice to reciprocate to also show yourself in green? It's only fair and is an equivalent exchange of energies. As of right now orange has the upper ground always, there is no balancing fairness in the dynamic
Yellow solves the issue of you don’t want to handle someone right now since they can only join you if they have another friend there they’ll be joining on instead
Yellow is mainly for visibility so everyone knows something is happening somewhere
Benefits friends+ worlds most
Orange can exist but only if Yellow is a thing too.
The number one reason people say they go into orange status is:
"So people I know who won't mesh with the current social environment won't join"
If there is another person there that they can join on then it's fine isn't it since they obviously can and your filtering does not need to occur while benefiting everyone else to broadcast what you are currently potentially doing.
Which goes to the next point of if people know what map you are in they can have a better guess if they would want to request join on you. Instead of them requesting join on you then seeing it's for an activity they didn't want to join anyways and it'll all just be a waste of a join request. And if there is anyone there in the map who is a friend of them anyways then they can just immediately join.
This aims to solve the issue of needing to send 25+ invite requests to orange people to even get one accept invite.
And the awkwardness that occurs when a friend of yours didn't accept your request invite but when you joined another friend of yours, the person who rejected your invite request is there... now with yellow status you could just join no issues as long as you have another friend there.