I run a few niche communities that would benefit from not being visible when people browse local or all. Is this possible?
Would it benefit the communities, or the public? Why should they be hidden?
As someone who is in their own niche communities (not on Lemmy) I suggest communities could have 3 modes: Standard, NSFW, and NSFL. If a community is marked NSFW or nsfl, it can never go back to Standard. If a community is marked NSFL, it can never be NSFW or Standard, or maybe if it does, all content from it is deleted.
Users could then set their preferences to standard, NSFW, or NSFL. If they choose NSFL, they see everything.
I think there needs to be individual degree of control beyond just the labels; especially for individual/small servers where owners might feel more individually liable.
For example, even within the NSFW space, there’s a wide varying degree of acceptable-ness depending where you are in the world and what your personal feelings are. A server owner in a more repressive parts of the world may put themselves in harms way if any LGBTQ+ (and apologies in advance, as I know I’m missing several letters and number, but I don’t remember the sequence order) content. Further extreme of the spectrum, “legal” age of drawn characters is another huge legality concern.
Simply having labels and depending on community moderator to label correctly (or even allowing server operators to try to override locally) seem like a only a very basic starting point, individual override is a must to prevent content that may get operators into trouble from even being shown in the first place.
The community. Right now, sometimes people post stuff and it gets down voted into oblivion before anyone who actually subscribes can see it. And then even when you go directly to the community, people don’t see that post because it’s down voted so much.
And I mean… The posts in question were so not offensive… Just probably not what the general public wants to read or engage with.
Let me give you a concrete example:
How was your church service today?
That’s it. That was one of the posts that was down voted into oblivion.
I don’t think it’s possible currently, but maybe a feature we can suggest for the future.
As for why your post got downvoted, it seems that Lemmy is majority Atheist, based on the amount of posts I see on “All / Hot”. Your community may be targeted by a small group if this is a recurring event.
I don’t have a good solution for you in the meantime. I know that communities can be blocked by instances, so you may be able to get in contact with lemmy.ml, beehaw, lem.ee, etc. instance owners and ask them to block your community from their feeds, or something like that.
On the flip side, is it possible to hide a community from showing up on my profile as my moderated community?
This needs to be a thing
It’s possible I think, but you need to access to the database in order to do so iirc
Even then, you could possibly block it from local, but not for all.
There are HideCommunity objects in the API, but I don’t actually find a function to call them. https://github.com/search?q=repo%3ALemmyNet%2Flemmy-js-client HideCommunity&type=code
You would need to build it into every call for showing local and all posts. Maybe there’s already a feature request for it.
I haven’t explored Lemmy code really at all. But it likely wouldn’t be all that difficult to implement.
Oh. You linked to the client. I think I’d build this into the API itself.
There is a database field, and the SELECT queries exclude it just as they do if a community is blocked.
Oh. OK. That makes sense to do it with the SQL. Probably faster that way
Hell even the bicycling community could use this. People who hate cars show up and spread shit.
It’s not hard to imagine LGBT communities, for example, and what they’ll go through without this.
Edit I replied to the wrong comment. I’m leaving it though!
Edit 2: Obviously that should say “…people who hate bicycles…”.
I still can’t find a call function. I’ve tried going right at API paths that seem defined, but it gives me a 404 on testing system. It seems the ability to set or clear it on a community is disabled. But I’m not entirely confident in reading the code correctly.
I cannot see why you don’t want people to stumble across Selenium automation. Kidding :)
Selenium automation is a very personal and private thing. :-)
