I’m sure this will get clarified in the release notes for 19.4, and I’m probably annoyingly jumping the gun … I’m just curious.
Otherwise, I find it cool to see this feature come out!
Isn’t ML running 0.19.4? Test it for us 😏
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.
Hopefully these don’t start getting used too frequently, as it kind of… defeats the purpose of federation. Would not want to have to make accounts on multiple instances just to participate in niche communities.
The point of federation is to publicly share what you want to publicly share, not to have unfettered access to whatever you want to consume.
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.
I created !imaginary@reddthat.com recently, Reddthat runs 0.19.4, the default setting was “Public”. Maybe it’s a configuration that can modified by admins?
Edit: completely misread the title, sorry
