Are there plans to make private communities accessible/usable without an account on the same instance ?
Is it possible to switch from private to public (and vice versa)?

Edit: I guess solutions for these kind of challenges depend on the specific use case. Could be selfhosting, or agreeing on a instance, or sometimes it doesn't have to be a federated software to begin with.

Sorry, i don't know if it is possible. I haven't tried/tested private community on Piefed. I recall you can add username to community. However, i wanted to react on switching private community to public community. There are case where you want to do that.

However, i think it is sensible and shouldn't be allowed or not decided by the mods team at least. I wouldn't recommend switching private to public, whatever is the software. Because there are things we talk between ourselve, and they should stay that way.

Maybe, it would requires to delete the whole posts and comments history ? Dunno, for me it would require people approval. Or something like mastodon that hide your post from people that aren't in your friend circle and then everyone could decide for themselve whatever is the community decision.

From a technical POV it is theoretically possible but not tested.

Most likely the various softwares would opt out of handling non-public content out of safety.

It is something we'd want to work on in lockstep with all the various devs 🙂

Yeah, I suspect this is why rimu made the initial version of private communities just local and not federated at all. Once things that are meant to remain private start traveling across the network to other servers, it's questionable how private that information can remain, especially if other software is involved.

Thank you! People could always make a second account on such an instance, maybe even an instance which kind of specializes in it and finds ways to deal with safety challenges.

I understand that. Thank you!

Thank you! You're right, those who interacted under the premise of privacy must not be exposed.