this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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A late pattern in Reddit was personal subreddits - communities named after the account that created them. They were infrequently used, but it provided a smoother pipeline for people who lurked or commented in existing communities to become comfortable making posts and moderating communities themselves.
Ideally these communities would be prevented from appearing in the "Trending Communities" list or local/global feeds unless someone other than the owner was subscribed to them, but wouldn't be private in the sense that no-one could see them. Just they wouldn't get wide distribution.
Another pattern is the "Country Club" post - where individual posts in a community could be limited to people verified to post in restricted threads. This comes from BlackPeopleTwitter. The individual verification method is likely not the only way to achieve this. People who comment or vote could be limited to only those who share the instance, are subscribed to the community before the post is made, or are members of instances whitelisted by the community.
Both of these patterns are interpretations of 'private' to mean 'restricted' and not 'secret'.
This raises a distinct but interesting additional feature request that might complement "private" or exclusive communities, as well as others that might like to prepare a community before promoting it: a hidden or unlisted setting for communities.
That would enable what you mention here, preventing their appearance from trending, and perhaps also user profile/data areas (i.e. if one can indirectly view others' subscriptions, this might offer a way to obfuscate/hide that from others besides admins).
That makes sense.