Private communities are already coming with the next release, v1.0.0: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5076
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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1.0.0?? We’re leaving beta???
As somebody who moderates health and diet communities, yes these community tools are absolutely required.
Especially with respect to voting, there needs to be an
- option for a community to not go to the all feed if requested
- option to only allow subscribers to vote
- ability that doesn't require a ban, but to unsubscribe someone from the community,
- require people to have accounts of a certain age, or certain level of participation in Lemmy, or in a community, before being able to post or vote
- remove a user from a community if they only have negative interaction with the community, like only down votes
Right now it's very difficult for small communities to get started unless they're loved by the current population of lemmy. Which means it's going to be difficult to bring other groups here.
I think it's critical for the growth of Lemmy that there are genuinely opt-in communities.
I think the philosophy needs to take into account that people want to make a community to talk about a subject, sometimes they want to talk about the subject in detail, and not just hold a general referendum on the popularity of the subject for the Lemmy as a whole.
Imagine star trek fans downvote everything from star wars, and vice versa. If someone comes along to make a community for snow speeder project building... They're going to have a bad time, all the Star trek fans will downvote and chill participation. We need these super small interest communities to grow to attract a broader population
Some of these will be available in Lemmy 1.0:
- #5478: different community visibilities, including
Unlistedwhich is not included in All feed, and Private (only approved followers can view/post) - #5038: some more site settings for voting
- Plugins RFC: allows arbitrary restrictions for voting and posting
That's really great! I look forward to it
ability that doesn’t require a ban, but to unsubscribe someone from the community,
remove a user from a community if they only have negative interaction with the community, like only down votes
Those don't really make too much sense to me. The first one just ban them if you don't want them participating in the community. You can do a temp ban and hope they chill out, and perm if they're that bad. But unsubscribing them just seems weird.
Some automod like functionality could handle the second one, but the lack of overall karma is what I like most about lemmy vs reddit. Plus once again you could just manually ban them. IDK if lemmy ignores votes from banned users though so they could just continue downvoting everything if they're petty.
Currently banned users cannot vote in the community
My main issue is if you ban somebody from a community, it goes into the mod log, kind of like that person's permanent record. It's harsh to ban somebody for just voting negativity
I don’t see why not, but would it work in practice with federation?
You can't truly bar federated content from being viewed by non-members, but you can totally make it not worth the effort for most people to see what's posted, and totally prevent contribution.
These kinds of restrictions wouldn't be about strict secrecy, just effectively creating a white list for speaking. A +v in IRC terms.
Gated enclaves? Sounds great. /s