I’ve peaked at that issue a couple of times, but I never worked out what the issue/feature got stuck on. Naively I would have thought it a relatively workable feature to add.

Woah woah … this is legit awesome! Just tested (on lemmy.ml) and yep … seems to be working like a charm!

Give up to matc-pub for the PR (and maybe a new core dev for lemmy too?).

I figure this makes live megathread style posts/chats more viable … which is certainly cool!

I’ve mentioned this before, but an interesting possibility might be to enable selected posts to be “live chats” through a websocket like process as lemmy used to be, just for selected posts for certain windows of time, whenever a live chat dynamic is sort.

It’s the sort of thing that could be scheduled and subject to admin approval or something if resources are a concern.

Otherwise … awesome to see!

Still, I think you raise a relevant malicious path. Like I said, I wouldn’t be surprised if something contentious happens however infrequently.

We can already create private instances that don’t federate for those niche communities;

That being said, creating a private instance is a relatively difficult hurdle. By providing private communities, an admin can take care of the hosting, along with all of the other communities, while those who want something more controlled and closed can have an easily accessible option. Plenty of people want their social media to have options for being relatively closed or relatively open, and I think it’s healthy to provide those options.

I hear you though on the lemmy-world community closing possibility (and similar) … that would easily be an abuse IMO and it’s not entirely clear what would or could happen.

To be fair though, the whole lemmy-world instance (or any other for that matter) could simply turn federation off at any point to the same effect you fear, so it’s arguably just part of the federation flexibility. In this case, any community mod has their hand on the switch for their community, which means we’ll probably see it get used in controversial circumstances at least once. But for any given community, going either private or local-only is sure to drop user engagement or be a PITA regarding managing the “approved users” list, so I can’t see it being a popular action TBH.

All good … the whole post was started by me misreading in the first place I think!

I think it’s a good option to have. Most who start communities want reach and engagement. But for those situations where you want a more in-group vibe, something like this is essential.

It’s sorely missing in the fediverse and a rather good form of social media TBH that the fediverse, until now, has ignored (while it has kinda taken off on discord etc).

Private communities though are intended to federate, just with gated membership. And they could be useful for particularly niche communities that don’t want to be disturbed by those who mainly use the All feed.

It will be interesting to see how it interacts with federation/defederation dynamics though. Lemmy-world for instance, could easily start going local only because they kinda already think they’re the whole of the threadiverse and are certainly big enough to sustain themselves.

Ha … it seems like it at least.

I think I was being dumb in asking the question actually.

It’s really just about the circle of users to whom the community is visible.

Local-only … visible only to users of the instance. I’d presumed that it could be writable only to users of the instance such that only users of the instance could post/comment there. But double checking, no, it’s only visible if you’re logged on with an account on that instance … so pretty private in the end actually.

private communities … which are apparently coming … are visible only to approved users, whether on the local instance or not.

And presumably, these will be stackable, so that a local-only + private community will be visible only to approved users from the local instance. So getting pretty closed.

Nice! Also nice to see some SQL wizardry get involved with lemmy!

makes sense … but still … you’re noticing a difference. Maybe a “boiling frog” situation?

Interesting. It could be for the same reason I suggest for lemmy.ml though. Do you notice latencies getting longer over time?

Well, I’ve been on this instance through a few updates now (since Jan 2023) and my impression is that it’s a pretty regular pattern (IE, certain APIs like that for replying to a post/comment or even posting have increasing latencies as uptime goes up).

yep! I didn’t pick up on any explicit link … but the coupling AI and recall is not coincidence. It’s serfdom.

🤷

in line with map_enthusiasts: [email protected] (and also [email protected] , which is smaller IIRC)

Agreed. I think something like this makes a lot of sense as a feature along with the private community feature being worked on.

Fair!

I suppose private communities probably address a lot of what I’m talking about.

Yea this is me too. All is for exploring for communities or just lazy doom scrolling.

Yea I realised that after I posted. I wasn’t really thinking about implementation details, and intentionally so, I was just trying to think through it from a UX perspective.

But yea, you’re absolutely right. With an API and federation, there is no such thing as “no upvotes from a certain kind of feed”. It was kinda dumb of me to suggest. Still, I’m personally happy to think out loud.

Limiting votes (and other interactions as mentioned in these threads) by whether a user has subscribed is more viable, but then again federation probably disrupts this again (I don’t know enough to be sure) and likely breaks some promises or conventions.

Yea interesting. I don’t know enough reddit lore to be sure of this, but I figured that there would be stories. Any more details?

For me, it seems pretty logical that this would happen (which is why I wrote this post). I realised that intuitively I’d never even thought of voting from the All feed and had to double check whether it was possible.

This doesn’t mean I’m right and that it shouldn’t be allowed, but instead, that there may be some real tension here and reasonable mental models of what a community is that go both ways on this.

Thanks!