this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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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 mean it's fine on paper. But like... imagine that a popular instance - lemmy.world, let's say - has a community that's very popular and, for whatever motivation, decides they want to push people to move to their instance (or at least create accounts there), so they change one or more of those popular communities to be local-only.
Best case, they fracture the community. Worse case, a very large number of users start making accounts there to use those communities, and abandon other instances. Worst case, they use the large influx of signups they get from such a move to promote themselves, grow even further, and eventually do something malicious.
We can already create private instances that don't federate for those niche communities; I don't really see what this feature is adding other than specifically having communities dedicated to that specific instance (With instance-specific information like donations, financials, outage notices, that sort of thing.)
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.
That's fair, and I'm honestly probably just thinking about worst-case scenarios that won't actually happen. There's plenty of ways malicious actors could already be doing some pretty bad things and they don't seem to be, so it's probably fine.
Still, I think you raise a relevant malicious path. Like I said, I wouldn’t be surprised if something contentious happens however infrequently.