Server Wide Feeds, Niche Communities, and Niche Posts

[DarkArc]

I was just reminded of a problem that I think is worth addressing: https://lemmy.world/comment/12311163

I think there are a few approaches / features that make sense to allow communities to have discussions or internally share news without worrying about getting disrupted by unwanted third parties input.

Potential Features in This Space

Unlisted Posts

The idea here is that posts could be marked as "unlisted", meaning that the post only appears in the community feed itself and in the feeds of people that have explicitly subscribed to that community's content.

This would be great for things like "hey guys, there's a discount!" (without possibly upsetting people scrolling the feed barging in with comments or down votes about the "ad" on their feed).

Default Unlisted

It might be interesting as well to allow a community to set a preference for whether posts in the community default to being unlisted or not. This would conceptually be useful for communities that are somewhat controversial or minority oriented (e.g., if you're in a server that has a lot of Xbox communities and you're trying to start up some PlayStation communities, you might not want to get the down votes or comments of the "Xbox is better!" folks in your community -- this same idea can apply to much more controversial ideas as well of course).

EDIT: Perhaps there's also a related concept of "unlisting yourself" on specific servers. For instance, a community might want to "unlist" themselves from servers where they're getting a lot of unwanted engagement without outright blocking the entire server (because just as there might be a lot of trouble from that server, there might be a lot of genuinely good community members).

Moderator Suppressed

A moderator might want to suppress a community from the feed without outright defederating/blocking it. This is purely a matter of content moderation as you might not want to outright "forbid" engaging with controversial topics, but you might want to limit the amount of attention they get.

For instance, a primarily gaming oriented server might want to allow users to engage with political content on other servers but not actively surface it in the server feed.

Subscriber Only

This is another potential approach. Users that have not subscribed to a community would be prevented from up voting, down voting, or commenting on a post until becoming a member of said community.

Shadow Voting

This is a twist on the subscriber only idea. Users would be able to up vote and down vote in communities they're not a part of, but those votes would not affect the published counts and would not be federated. The votes could be used to modify site wide recommendations without negatively impacting users of said communities (e.g., in the aforementioned examples, users of a gaming server might see a political post, and down vote it -- severely reducing the chances of it being recommended to other users of that server, but the visible counts might stay positive because people subscribed to that community actually were interested in the content).