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.
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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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.
I'm guessing that's not really possible by design, since a subscriber from a remote instance automatically means their instance has to mirror all content from your community. It's not possible (AFAIK) to make a community available to just one user of a remote instance; at least the admin will always see the mirrored content.
Aside from that, it's also not possible to authenticate a remote user.
I think if a remote user can moderate a community, there's probably a way for a private communities to eventually be a thing.
Exactly. The mechanisms needed to implement it are there, but I don’t think the devs are interested in much more than making it more stable and robust right now.
At this time, no. Everything is always public.
The only current setting available, is disabling the ability to post to a community, so that only mods can post.