maegul

maegul, 6 days ago

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.

maegul, 6 days ago

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.

maegul, 6 days ago

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.

maegul, 6 days ago

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

maegul, 5 days ago

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

maegul, 6 days ago

I really don’t think this video is click bait. It’s reason for existing might be the media hype and clickbait crap that has been produced … but all the video does is dig into the published science and generally dispel what all the media hype is probably saying. It’s the opposite.

At some point, if anti-clickbait behaviour is going to be sufficiently superficial, it’s likely as bad as clickbait itself (not unlike an auto-immune disease).

maegul, 6 days ago

Right, so you didn’t watch the video … it’s about the paper that’s getting so much media attention and why most in the scientific community don’t think much of it and what challenges to the initial paper have been made in subsequent publications.

The video is solely about published work, by a publishing and working scientist, and not at all some mainstream media stuff.

Gotta say, at some point, if downvoters are operating at such a superficial level, their reason for existing basically disappears. Like an AI would have done a better job here. The quality of the video is precisely because it nicely dispels whatever media hype might be out there.

maegul, 5 days ago

Yea, I’d heard about this planet, but I didn’t know how much modelling was involved and of course what alternatives can explain the data. Still, the new data that hasn’t been analysed seems like it could be interesting.

maegul, 6 days ago

As naive as it might be about Portugal etc … genuinely (and positively) … woah!