It would be nice if we could kin people, allowing us to chat at them at any time, but also separately allow or disallow them from seeing if we're online/offline or our character's portrait. The idea here is that:
A: You can kin neighbors and such and either of you can decide to mask kin status or equipment if you're not sure you can trust each other, but can still chat and thus do some trading and whatnot to gain trust, and
B: You can kin people you KNOW you can't trust and still be able to chat to them if you want to.
I specifically think B would be fun because there's this lone raider who's chased me a couple times and it would be fun if we could kin each other without the privacy violations and be like "ohhhh that was close you almost got me!" "oohhhh i would have had you too if not for that speed boost!" "oooohhh!" "ooooooohhhhhhh!"