cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/664960

It would be useful to have more refined control over participation in a group. Someone should be able to create a group that gives permissions to specific individuals. A variety of permissions would be useful:

• permission to see that a community/mag exists (some groups may or may not want to be listed in searchable a public directory)
• permission to read the posts in a community/mag
• permission to vote in the community/mag
• permission to start a new thread in the community/mag
• permission to comment on an existing thread in the community/mag

A forum creator should be able to set the above perms on:

• individual accounts
• all users on an instance (e.g. users on an instance @weH8privacy.com might be unfit for voting and writing comments in the community “fightForPrivacy”)
• all users not on an instance (e.g. local users only for example)
• instance IP-based (e.g. users from Cloudflared instances might be unfit to participate in a group called “decentralizationAdvocacy”)

Settings for individuals should override instance-specific settings. So e.g. a “fightForPrivacy” forum might allow all forms of participation from an instance stop1984.org, but if antiprivacyMallory@stop1984.org is uncivil, a mod should be able to block all inputs from that user yet perhaps still allow antiprivacyMallory to just read the posts on the off chance of influencing the user to be more civil through exposure to civil chatter.

Workaround 1 (Lemmy only):

Make an announcement community and make all participants a moderator. Bit crazy unless you really trust everyone involved.

Workaround (Lemmy):

One community per instance using instance-specific registration control. Still too blunt, cumbersome, excludes mods who don’t have their own instance.