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1. Embed this notice
   silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Saturday, 01-Aug-2026 05:18:08 JST silverpill
   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

   • Embed this notice
     silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Saturday, 01-Aug-2026 05:34:50 JST silverpill

     in reply to

     • william ⁂ maggos

     @wjmaggos I think it's good to have public and private communications in one app. In theory ActivityPub could be used for public and Matrix for private, but as a developer I really don't want to deal with two very complex protocols at the same time.

   • Embed this notice
     william ⁂ maggos (wjmaggos@liberal.city)'s status on Saturday, 01-Aug-2026 05:34:51 JST william ⁂ maggos

     in reply to

     @silverpill

     yea. I'm kinda torn. imo private groups are not social media, but social networking. they should be done via matrix. but then I also recognize that most people care more about private groups than they do doing any more than consuming social media (algo media but also google and apple news feeds). so if I want people boosting and replying as part of a public square, I should probably promote systems that do both. something that is mostly like facebook but also somewhat like twitter.

   • Embed this notice
     Mitch Conner (mitchconner@clubcyberia.co)'s status on Saturday, 01-Aug-2026 07:30:45 JST Mitch Conner

     in reply to
     @silverpill Google Plus Circles was perfect. I just want that functionality. It was basically specific distribution lists you could address posts to and people outside those groups could not see it if set to private.
     silverpill repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Saturday, 01-Aug-2026 07:30:45 JST silverpill

     in reply to

     • Mitch Conner

     @mitchconner As far as I know, this feature exists in Hubzilla and its forks.

   • Embed this notice
     silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Saturday, 01-Aug-2026 07:33:30 JST silverpill

     in reply to

     • Jordan

     @jordan Once private communities land in stable Lemmy, we can consider this feature standardized and widely adopted.

   • Embed this notice
     Jordan (jordan@mastodon.subj.am)'s status on Saturday, 01-Aug-2026 07:33:31 JST Jordan

     in reply to

     @silverpill Could it be that people are referring to standardized & universally (or widely) adopted fediverse groups across the different platforms?

   • Embed this notice
     Blurry Moon (sun@shitposter.world)'s status on Saturday, 01-Aug-2026 07:42:29 JST Blurry Moon

     in reply to
     But Mastodon doesn’t have it so
   • Embed this notice
     silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Saturday, 01-Aug-2026 07:42:29 JST silverpill

     in reply to

     • Blurry Moon

     @sun Mastodon devs can copy this feature from Mitra after I implement Lemmy's private groups.

   • Embed this notice
     silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Saturday, 01-Aug-2026 08:00:43 JST silverpill

     in reply to

     • william ⁂ maggos
     • Jupiter Rowland

     @jupiter_rowland @wjmaggos How group moderation works there? Is it possible to assign multiple moderators?

   • Embed this notice
     Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Saturday, 01-Aug-2026 08:00:46 JST Jupiter Rowland

     in reply to

     • william ⁂ maggos
     @william ⁂ maggos @silverpill Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are much closer to Facebook-style social networking than to Twitter-style social media. In fact, they're descendants of Friendica, the first decentralised dedicated Facebook alternative. (Let's set aside that Hubzilla is usually referred to as something like a "social CMS" for a moment.)
     
     They have multiple ways of rendering groups private, all of which go beyond Mastodon's way of making something private by limiting the receiving actors.
     
     For starters, private groups only grant their own members permission to receive any content from the group. Also, private groups only grant their own members permission to see the group stream. Furthermore, private groups only grant their own members permission to see the group channel profile and its contacts. On Hubzilla, these are all separate options.
     
     On top of all this, they can hide groups from directories. That way, these groups can be made known only by hearsay and/or personal contact to interested users. This doesn't necessarily make them private; it makes them secret.
     
     All these options are available for normal, non-group-actor channels as well, by the way.
     
     #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #PrivateGroups
   • Embed this notice
     Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Saturday, 01-Aug-2026 08:03:53 JST Jupiter Rowland

     in reply to

     • Mitch Conner
     @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