I believe you … gate-keeping types are all over the place really.

But vegans or the “vegan-curious” aren’t one thing or one kind of person, at least not any more. I personally have only ever had positive conversations with vegan types.

This instance, in being insistent on not entertaining any “harm reduction” or “compromises”, makes sense though … because it’s a space for people to talk about that sort of dedicated approach.

they drive away potential allies because the concept of harm reduction is anathema to their binary thinking. If you’re not ALL in, you’re the enemy.

I can resonate with that. But I come back to … “it’s totally ok for people to create their own spaces, especially on federated social media and especially for minority groups/ideas”.

There are likely plenty of other spaces for “potential allies” to engage and talk about veganism if they want to, or plenty they, or you, could make on their own.

Tacitly admitting that vegans are usually antisocial zealots. “It’s right in the name!”

Well, they’re running their own social media platform, so I’m not sure how anti-social they are.

Right. Well, I think the instance name “vegantheory.org” was doing that already, and I’m betting you drew your conclusion from the public description of the place too (and aren’t in the modlog or anything for challenging their ideas).

And what would a non-vegan want to do in there?

What’s wrong with minority views and practices creating their own spaces?

On which, is there any non-vegan/anti-vegan thought or idea that a vegan is likely to have not heard already? How many haven’t they heard relative to the amount of decent “pro-vegan” ideas they also haven’t heard of?

Maybe a specialised space, echo chamber even, makes sense in order to balance against the gravity of the mainstream?

I’ve peaked at that issue a couple of times, but I never worked out what the issue/feature got stuck on. Naively I would have thought it a relatively workable feature to add.

Woah woah … this is legit awesome! Just tested (on lemmy.ml) and yep … seems to be working like a charm!

Give up to matc-pub for the PR (and maybe a new core dev for lemmy too?).

I figure this makes live megathread style posts/chats more viable … which is certainly cool!

I’ve mentioned this before, but an interesting possibility might be to enable selected posts to be “live chats” through a websocket like process as lemmy used to be, just for selected posts for certain windows of time, whenever a live chat dynamic is sort.

It’s the sort of thing that could be scheduled and subject to admin approval or something if resources are a concern.

Otherwise … awesome to see!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Nice! Also nice to see some SQL wizardry get involved with lemmy!

makes sense … but still … you’re noticing a difference. Maybe a “boiling frog” situation?

Interesting. It could be for the same reason I suggest for lemmy.ml though. Do you notice latencies getting longer over time?

Well, I’ve been on this instance through a few updates now (since Jan 2023) and my impression is that it’s a pretty regular pattern (IE, certain APIs like that for replying to a post/comment or even posting have increasing latencies as uptime goes up).

🤷

Big issue IMO. Never touched it for that reason.

A personal knowledge system has to be designed to last the rest of your life.

I’m scared of cults and not ever being truly enlightened is a risk I’m willing to take. Maybe one day.

Seriously though, in terms of longevity, where I want the dependencies of my system to last for the rest of my life and to be easily installed on as many machines throughout the rest of my life, SQLite (and pure Python for the wrapper, using only the std lib) seem like good bets. Better bets than emacs and org-mode, perhaps not, but certainly without the baggage of being bound to a text editor.

EDIT: just clicked the link, lol.

your own hacked together wrapper around sqlite as a plugin for your text editor of choice

Agreed. I think something like this makes a lot of sense as a feature along with the private community feature being worked on.