silverpill@silverpill@mitra.social

Private groups

Lately, I've been seeing various people claiming that fediverse doesn't have private groups. They often point to some task force at w3c that is supposedly working to fill the gap.

However, fediverse has had private groups for a very long time:

- Hubzilla channels. This project probably had private groups before ActivityPub. The implementation was later adapted for ActivityPub and refined in subsequent forks, Streams and Forte. It is now partially documented in FEP-171b: Conversation Containers.
- Smithereen groups. This implementation is documented in FEP-400e: Publicly-appendable ActivityPub collections (published in 2021) and FEP-db0e: Authentication mechanism for non-public groups.
- Lemmy communities. Private groups were proposed in Lemmy RFC 0005 and have been implemented in the development version. There is a test instance running this version (Lemmy v1.0b) at https://voyager.lemmy.ml/

There are probably other implementations that I am not aware of.

#Hubzilla #Smithereen #Lemmy

info.hubzilla.huGroups / Forums / Communities - en - Hubzilla KnowledgeDB
Jupiter Rowland@jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Replying to @⁨mitchconner@clubcyberia.co⁩

@Mitch Conner @silverpill Exactly this exists on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte. With even more options, actually. Hubzilla calls them "privacy groups", (streams) and Forte call them "access lists".

Now it comes: You can not only post to one specific such group/list. You can also post to several ones. Or to any combination of privacy groups/access lists and single contacts.

Better yet: You can even exclude single contacts or the members of certain privacy groups/access lists. You can post to the members of privacy groups Foo and Bar, except if they're also in privacy group Baz, and except for Alice, and in addition, you can post to Bob and Carol.

In addition, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte don't just define who receives the post. They don't simply flag it a DM either. They flag it "restricted" and only grant the recipients permission to read the post, read any comments and interact with anything in the conversation. In practice, this also means that those who have these permissions can not only interact with the original poster, but just as well with each other, because it isn't a DM.

Anything that doesn't understand these permissions, e.g. Mastodon, do understand it as a DM. This limits their possibilities to interact, but it's the safe way.

And yet, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte still have private and/or secret groups with moderation (like Facebook groups) on top of all this. (streams) and Forte even optionally have two levels of non-moderator users.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #PrivateGroups #Permissions #PrivacyGroups #AccessLists
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