To allow invite-only communities

hello,

I suggest that we allow invite-only communities. They would not be private, but read-only to those who haven’t been invited yet.

The purpose of it would be to allow administrators and moderators to guide the growth of their communities, to help them grow organically, in a controlled fashion, so as to gather like-minded people who make high-quality contributions to their communities. Once a community has become large and stable enough, its administrator may make it open for anyone to participate in it.

What do you think?

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I think this is a great idea. What about actually private communities as well? This would be possible via some type of encryption.

Invite-only communities are on the roadmap — this is mostly a frontend feature, so it is relatively straightforward to implement without touching the network.

Private communities however, is a bit of an issue. Aether is a flood network, what that means is, your computer will carry an almost full copy of the network (minus the stuff you blocked, or whitelisted, and so on). That means even if we make a community private by encrypting it and, those encrypted messages that no one outside the community can read still uses the network and disk space of every computer on the network. For people who are not in that community, there is no incentive to carry those messages since they have no use for them. If we implemented this, somebody would eventually make an “Aether Lite” that doesn’t carry those private messages. And that would be a better app, since it would not be spending resources on things you couldn’t see, and people would move to that app, since it would be lighter without losing any functionality.

For the private communities to work, there has to be a reason for other people that can’t see it to still carry it. For invite-only communities they can still read the content, so they get some benefit from carrying the content, so that one works out.

My last comment is an interesting idea. Merging the two different models could help us with issues that may emerge, as we have the flexibility to chose the correct one, instead of welding it on.

That may also help with “marketing” kind of accounts, where the community is for a “product” (company, youtube channel). Those make money, and money making is something we need to be able to do.

Private communities may be better as something more “authoritative”, as that is the intention that we have there. Select one user with say port forwarding as the “central node”, then sync that with all invited users?
“Invite to write” could work in some cases. That is a Twitter feature. Read a discussion between specific people, but no responses from people we do not want.

So we do have an announcement coming that makes invite-only and private communities possible, albeit on a non-P2P accompaniment to the app. We do have something called Aether Pro that used to be a separate app while we worked out the kinks on it — and now it’s mature enough for the real show, so it will get merged into the main app.

Essentially, for the things that the P2P network can’t do (because of the reasons above), we’ll be offering a new option on the community creation screen that can run your community on something that acts more like Mastodon, a ‘federated’ server of sorts where you can create your communities on, alongside the P2P network. If you want to have a private community, for example, this will allow you to be able to do this. This is solely an addition, so the P2P network isn’t changing or changing behaviour or anything like that — it’s just that on the creation screen for a community, it will allow you to choose a private community if you’re OK with having it, for the lack of a better term, ‘federated’ instead of decentralised.

We’ll be announcing this very soon, so I don’t want to spoil that announcement here. But I do realise this is a common feature request and I’ve been working on making this possible.

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