Meta

I often send links to friends who probably don't have a Lemmy account. Keeping everything visible to everyone would help me.

If there is a reasonable concern about server resources/costs, then I would be willing to give up a little convenience.

Throwing my two-cents into the discussion, I tend to dislike walled/gardens on principle. Putting information behind account walls is detrimental to the principles of an open and democratic internet. So long as there are reasonable ways to limit bad actors, I would prefer we remain discoverable to the open internet.

It's a bit of a tough sell to not let anyone interested in joining in see anything first. I know it's federated, but it's still a bit, I don't know, hostile(?) or something. If you feel the need to close off then the troops will largely accept the decision, but if you feel you can manage without doing that I'd definitely prefer to keep things accessible when feasible.

I can think of a few downsides. Definitely not all equally weighted.

• Poor discoverability. I doubt many people are finding us on Google, but any who do would be unable anymore.
• Inability to send people links. This also hurts discoverability from being able to send people a link for them to check out.
• Problems with linking federation. At the moment, there's no way to link to a specific post or comment in a way that users of other instances can see it on their instance. So most of the time, the best option is to link it in your own instance, and they can view it read-only in your instance. T his would break that.
• Problems for cross-posts with bodies. Related to the above, when using "cross-post" on a post with a text body, a link is provided to link back to the original. This link will be useless if the instance is private.

I'd lean to leaving it open access.

Too many places become effectively 'walled gardens' and become difficult or impossible to just stumble across eg via search results etc.

Of course, there are the cost and performance considerations. idk if there's a way to monitor logged in vs others. Or is there some way to prioritize serving responses to logged in users? I guess lemmy may not have that capability, and I don't know how the server/instances are setup, but maybe split to have one server serving logged in users, and another to cater for 'the rest'?

Meh, it may be adding to complexity for little benefit.

As others have mentioned, there'd seem to be hard downsides:

• Can't send direct links to people who don't have an account
• Harder for people to 'discover' the instance or check it out, which would surely reduce people signing up to the instance and participating in our community into the future

So I'd be against it unless there's really strong reasons for it. I haven't really experienced bad server-load issues.

There's conceivably a middle-ground where the instance becomes logged-in-only automatically under high load. That'd no doubt be a considerable extra work, but just throwing it out there as an idea. I still don't think even that's necessarily a great idea, because again, if the traffic is people showing interest in the instance, that's a good thing in the long term. It'd be better than setting it to logged-in-only all the time, though.

I think logged-in-only should be pretty much a last resort for addressing performance issues, and all other possibilities should be considered first, including spending more money.

I think an important part of the pitch for federated instances is being on one instance while interacting with another. If someone new can't do this before they make their account, could they get the impression that we're unfederated? I worry that it might give the illusion that we're a "dead", insular site, at least as a first impression.

Is that just browsing, or direct links to post too? I like the ability to share links to posts

So my non-technical view is it'd be better to stay public. I don't know the costs for resources, so i'll leave that for others.

Staying open

• People perusing the internet could find useful information on the communities here.

• The views of normal people probably want to be visible on the internet in these times, i think AZ excels at delivering a space for reasonable people. Whether its AI crawlers getting skewed to psychotic, or average people trying to find a space that isn't so extreme, i think the more visible reasonableness is the better.

• the reddit argument. This is a clone of reddit afterall, and a mantra of reddit was to be 'the front page of the internet'. Doesn't mean we have to stay the same, but we should consider the departure from that idea and its implications.

• Do we know the route that people take to become new users? We don't want to block off that route.

• Sometimes it can be useful for me to quickly look at communities without logging in, in the browser. Just to see what a post or feature in a particular community looks like. Its a niche use, and it wouldn't be a big hassle to go without.

Do people find the server organically through Google results or something else that may be impacted by the change? If there's value in that there might be an argument against going private.

If enabling it reduces the need for server upgrades as time goes on I guess it's a positive though. Don't want to be paying extra server costs just to help out some AI company.

Hello,

First of all, well done with the fast update!

Edit: never mind, misread the feature

~~I hope I'm not hijacking this thread as an non-aussie.zone users.~~

~~Meta communities tend to be useful for other users as well. For instance, the delay with LW was mostly discussed here, and allowed other users to refer to the issue. Lemmy.cafe for instance had an issue with thumbnails for a bit, and as the meta community was private, the post with the details could not be viewed by other instances users.~~

~~Maybe you could consider keeping this community public, and create another community that would be private?~~