PieFed Meta

I would like to suggest modifying the collapse button to feature a right arrow symbol (🞂) on the left side of the name to indicate a collapsed thread, and a longer down arrow symbol (🞃) for an uncollapsed thread. The thread delimiter line would go up just to the symbol. This change would replace the current two diagonal arrows that are located to the right of the votes, which I hadn't even noticed before today, and I thought that functionality was missing.

I'd also suggest enhancing the visibility of the thread delimiter line. I suggest making it grey and of the same thickness for most of its length, and then thickening it, and increasing its opacity, and adding color only at the level of the comment.

Ok so here's my pitch:

So far I really like PieFed, and I'm hoping to set up some kind of online forum as an adjunct to an in-person discussion group in my city.

For now, I expect it will probably be non-federated, and invite-only.

Those things are already features in PieFed as far as I can tell (well, maybe not invite codes exactly, but using approved signups would work roughly the same way in this case).

Looking to the future though, here's what I'd be super excited to see: the option to make some of the communites visible to non-logged-in visitors, and/or federatable with other instances, while still keeping most communities semi-private; that is, only visible to registered & logged-in local server accounts.

Bonus points if some of those semi-private communities could instead be even more private, i.e., posts only visible to approved members of that specific community. To be fair, maybe the chat functionality is good enough in those cases, I dunno :)

I'm guessing this is a big ask. However, this particular group may not need those functions near-term, so I'd be especially eager to spin up a PieFed server if I knew those kinds of things might be in the pipeline.

My other viable choice right now is Discourse, but like, it's kinda corporate, and it's really JavaScript-heavy, which to me is kind of an equity issue when it comes to data plans and user device speed etc.

Thanks!