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.
