Is there a setting anywhere for moderators to take a community private (to make the posts, comments and other data visible only for people who are subscribed)?
If so, how does the mechanism work for finding and/or subscribing to private communities?
Is there a setting anywhere for moderators to take a community private (to make the posts, comments and other data visible only for people who are subscribed)?
If so, how does the mechanism work for finding and/or subscribing to private communities?
Wouldn’t a private community basically be running your own server and not federating?
I’ve not RTFM, but I don’t think it can be per community, but you can choose who to federate with.
But then everyone who wants to interact with it has to make an account first.
And the content would not be hidden. You’d be able to see it without an account by just going to that instance directly.
I have no idea how “Reddit + Fediverse” (i.e. Lemmy) works in terms of federating, but on Reddit, all you had to do was select an option to set your subreddit to private (only visible to subscribers).
It seems strange if Lemmy doesn’t have a similar feature, for example, if you run a niche community and don’t want random people giving unwelcome, ignorant, malevolent, etc. opinions. Also, in case Lemmy ever has enough users to be prone to “brigading” (groups ganging up on a community to downvote everything, harass subscribers, etc.), a “private” option seems like a basic and necessary feature.
You’ll have to keep in mind that every “basic” feature needs to be made by “someone”.
Features don’t just pop into existence, just because they’re needed.
All the work being done by the devs at the moment, is “necessary”, and as they can only do so much, some “necessary” things will have to wait until other “necessary” things are done.