Bonfire has groups on their roadmap but doesn't currently implement them (although Circles let you do some group-like things). A broadly-available approximation to private Facebook groups would be a huge plus for fedi. Here's a distillation of some requirements-gathering work I did early last year.

Anyhow I included a couple of questions relevant to this in one of the new polls at https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/115843753929752441

• Something to replace "buy nothing" Facebook groups

• Discussions with people in my neighborhood (without Nextdoor's racism)

• Discussions that aren't public for the whole world to see

@hollie @ansate @Matt_Noyes @CaitlinWaddick @edumerco @dphiffer @django @sam @ktoddbrown @MarieVC

@mildlyunreasonable I included this in one of the new polls at https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/115843662200325736 and so far it's getting 100% agreement!

@thenexusofprivacy appreciate that. Yeah safety is an issue for most sites that most people ignore. That is what I’m looking for, primarily. Less mansplaining comes in a close second. lol.

@thenexusofprivacy

No AI, no capitulation to Big Information, end to end encryption without backdoors, and warrant canaries published monthly. Our governments are the problem. Corporations are the problem. Capitalism is the problem. You are a customer, not a product.

@thenexusofprivacy

Eh...

Not really "long posts with no character limits"...

Just maybe twice the chars I'm allowed on my current Mastodon instance.

Don't need to get crazy but once in a while I'm a touch constrained...

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@lupus_blackfur fair enough. "no character limits" was the way the suggestion that came in was worded.

@thenexusofprivacy

Oh, I've no doubt...

Not criticizing, not complaining, just clarifying my personal view on that option.

I'm sure I don't need/want "unlimited", just a bit more would be nice in some infrequent instances.

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@thenexusofprivacy I don't understand why anti-racist environment it's 100% if people can choose as many opinions as they wanted… Are people just getting confused about polls?

Wow, today I learned that if you edit the text of a poll after it closes, it reopens it. Who knew? (Quite possibly everybody but me, but still.). My apologies to everybody who voted for the unencessary notification about the poll closing, and to everybody who boosted about the notification that I edited it, and to everybody who voted and boosted for two unnecessary notifications.

In any case, all the polls in the thread https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/115822536953660507 are now open again -- and the pol.is conversation is still open as well.

The results so far are certainly interesting. Currently the top 10 responses are:

96%: Accurate, weird information about things I didn't know I would care about

91%: An anti-racist environment

90%: A place where I don't have to deal with AI slop

89%: A social network that's not run by a corporation making money from my data

86%: An ad-free environment

86%: interacting with people from different countries

78%: A pro-LGBTQIA2S+ environment

78%: Amusement and whimsy

78%: A place where I'm in control of what I do and don't see

77%: A place with safety team to handle anti-Blackness, racism, etc when it happens.

@webhat yeah, and pro-LGBTQIA2S+ at 78% similarly sticks out. it's certianly possible people are getting confused -- it's happened before, and I now say in each post that people can vote for as many as they want, but it's still easy to miss.

Then again it's also certainly possible that 9% of the people here don't care either way about whether or not it's an anti-racist environment -- or would even prefer an environment that isn't anti-racist. The number in society as a whole is a lot higher!