Hi piefed.ca people!

I have been posting in the lemmy.ca instance and would just like to say that there are some communities which I want to keep local, not public. Though I wish the options were more granular. I want to include piefed.ca along with lemmy.ca, but it's not possible right now.

My reason is that I want to create real Canadian communities that are not shouting their existence from the rooftops. I want anybody in them to have the will or the interest to find them. This would largely be Canadians and those who have an interest in Canada - both of which are fantastic! In this sense, I feel that bad actors and trolls are largely excluded.

I just find it regretful and frustrating, and want to say hello and that I appreciate all the Canadians and those interested in Canada who are posting here.

Though I wish the options were more granular. I want to include piefed.ca along with lemmy.ca, but it’s not possible right now.

Yea unfortunately that's a technical limitation right now. It might be possible to create a custom workaround for that, but it's messy, and it increases the risk of something breaking. Also, while I don't expect the culture or admin teams of lemmy.ca and piefed.ca to diverge, it might go against the intended behaviour of the feature and users might not like that.

Personally, I've found that local only communities are more trouble than they're worth. Since this side of the internet is already quieter than the older social media platforms, people that show up are already fairly interested in finding it. Also there are Canadians on other instances that wouldn't be able to participate in the community.

You are completely welcome to restrict or moderate your community as you see fit, and this is just my perspective as a user rather than a site admin. I like to encourage people to join whichever instance they want to instead of pushing for people to join our instances only. That keeps the Fediverse healthier and lowers the risk of one instance (whether it is ours or someone else's) dominating a niche, like older social media monopolies have. This sentiment is shared by other team members and a lot of the users, so it's not a big risk right now, but that's the reason why I feel that way :)

What might be easier is to create rules for who you would like to see participating in the community. Generally, people here are good about following community rules. The admin team is also pretty quick about removing spam and content that breaks instance wide rules