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.

#Hubzilla #Smithereen #Lemmy

2026-07-31 22:25:32

william ⁂ maggos

wjmaggos@liberal.city

@silverpill

yea. I'm kinda torn. imo private groups are not social media, but social networking. they should be done via matrix. but then I also recognize that most people care more about private groups than they do doing any more than consuming social media (algo media but also google and apple news feeds). so if I want people boosting and replying as part of a public square, I should probably promote systems that do both. something that is mostly like facebook but also somewhat like twitter.

2026-07-31 22:34:09

silverpill

silverpill@mitra.social

@wjmaggos I think it's good to have public and private communications in one app. In theory ActivityPub could be used for public and Matrix for private, but as a developer I really don't want to deal with two very complex protocols at the same time.

2026-08-01 00:50:24

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@william ⁂ maggos @silverpill Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte are much closer to Facebook-style social networking than to Twitter-style social media. In fact, they're descendants of Friendica, the first decentralised dedicated Facebook alternative. (Let's set aside that Hubzilla is usually referred to as something like a "social CMS" for a moment.)

They have multiple ways of rendering groups private, all of which go beyond Mastodon's way of making something private by limiting the receiving actors.

For starters, private groups only grant their own members permission to receive any content from the group. Also, private groups only grant their own members permission to see the group stream. Furthermore, private groups only grant their own members permission to see the group channel profile and its contacts. On Hubzilla, these are all separate options.

On top of all this, they can hide groups from directories. That way, these groups can be made known only by hearsay and/or personal contact to interested users. This doesn't necessarily make them private; it makes them secret.

All these options are available for normal, non-group-actor channels as well, by the way.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #PrivateGroups

2026-07-31 23:57:39

Mitch Conner

mitchconner@clubcyberia.co

@silverpill Google Plus Circles was perfect. I just want that functionality. It was basically specific distribution lists you could address posts to and people outside those groups could not see it if set to private.

2026-07-31 23:59:11

Jordan

jordan@mastodon.subj.am

@silverpill Could it be that people are referring to standardized & universally (or widely) adopted fediverse groups across the different platforms?

2026-08-01 00:15:00

Blurry Moon

sun@shitposter.world

But Mastodon doesn’t have it so

2026-08-01 01:20:17

Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂

pepecyb@hub.hubzilla.hu

@silverpill

I get the feeling that a lot of people here are confusing two things that work in completely different ways. Some people use the term ‘group’ to mean something more like the Circles on Google+ or the ‘Aspects’ on Diaspora*, whilst others mean something more like Facebook groups.

Both exist on Hubzilla (and (streams) and Forte). The former is called a ‘Privacy Group’ on Hubzilla and is what @Jupiter Rowland described in his first post; the second variant is called a ‘Community Forum’ (or simply ‘Forum’) on Hubzilla and was mentioned by @Jupiter Rowland in his second post.

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