You can set a community to local, which would close off the community to everyone other than programming.dev users, or you can set a community to hidden, which will hide the community for everyone. For hidden communities you need a direct link to discover the community, and you then need to subscribe to it to see any content, otherwise the community will empty. Like this:
That’s not what I understood from dessalines@lemmy.ml comment here.
I thought this is possible now, although it may require setting this in the database directly.
You can set a community to local, which would close off the community to everyone other than programming.dev users, or you can set a community to hidden, which will hide the community for everyone. For hidden communities you need a direct link to discover the community, and you then need to subscribe to it to see any content, otherwise the community will empty. Like this: