Should local only communities be viewable without login?

[Nutomic]

Question

Communities with visibility "local only" can be useful for meta discussions about the local instance, where users from other instances shouldnt be able to participate. However it may be relevant for new users to browse such a meta community before registering, to get an idea how the instance is administrated. In case of lemmy.ml we had /c/meta as local only, but had to change it back to public because the post What is lemmy.ml? linked in the sidebar was not visible without login anymore.

It would be very simple to make a change so that local only communities can be browsed by any user without login. They would still not be federated to other instances. Another option would be a separate visibility level which disables community federation, but allows viewing it without login.

[poVoq]

For me "local" doesn't mean hidden, so yet they should be visible to visitors.

Edit: the question if visible to visitors or not seems to be more related to NSFW communities and might be integrated with that as a general setting.

[dessalines]

Both make sense to me, but I suppose local-only could mean read-public, write-local, rather than read-local, write-local.

[dullbananas]

abilities (view, post, comment) should be configurable separately, with "local only" being an option for each one, instead of communities having only one "local only" option

[Nutomic]

Both make sense to me, but I suppose local-only could mean read-public, write-local, rather than read-local, write-local.

This would be a lot more complex because we would have to federate the write permission status and check it before each write action (and also display it in the ui). What Im suggesting is to only change a few lines, so that these local only communities are returned from the api regardless of user.

abilities (view, post, comment) should be configurable separately, with "local only" being an option for each one, instead of communities having only one "local only" option

This would be even more complex, and would be a major new feature.

For me "local" doesn't mean hidden, so yet they should be visible to visitors.

Edit: the question if visible to visitors or not seems to be more related to NSFW communities and might be integrated with that as a general setting.

Nsfw content can also be viewed without login if the instance has a content warning configured.

[dessalines]

What Im suggesting is to only change a few lines, so that these local only communities are returned from the api regardless of user.

That'd be good as a short term fix, as long as we keep this issue or another one open, for multiple permissions and abilities.

[dullbananas]

Existing privacy really shouldn't be removed.

[dullbananas]

Actually it might be fine, since the people who can join an instance and what version of Lemmy it runs are both controlled by the same people. But it may or may not be better than just adding the per-ability config, since admins who need private local-only communities would be temporarily unable to use the latest version.

[Nutomic]

A separate setting for making communities visibile with login or without would not make sense, because federated instances would likely not respect it (eg old Lemmy versions or other platforms like mbin). What we could do is a new variant for CommunityVisibility which currently looks like this:

/// Defines who can browse and interact with content in a community.
pub enum CommunityVisibility {
  /// Public community, any local or federated user can interact.
  #[default]
  Public,
  /// Unfederated community, only local users can interact.
  LocalOnly,
  /// Users need to be approved by mods before they are able to browse or post.
  Private,
}

For example rename LocalOnly to LocalOnlyPrivate, and add a new variant LocalOnlyPublic.

[DraconicNEO]

Yes they should be, they're only meant to be local non-federated communities, not private communities. If we want ones that are only visible to logged in users, or better yet, subscribers. We should have a community type which is private, that doesn't Federate, and requires users to be logged in and/or subscribed to view it at all.