private (invite only) and/or "local only"/nonfederated magazines

[akohlsmith]

This is a feature request to have the ability to have invite-only (i.e. only specific users or server instances) magazines. If this is too "weird" for mbin's architecture, then a very good approximation would be to allow specific magazines to NOT federate at all (i.e. they are local only.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

My use case involves having the ability for my mbin user to post to a "personal" or "family" or "friends" microblog. My usual microblog posts would be global or public, but I could also select one of these more restrictive magazines to limit the reach.

Describe the solution you'd like

Ideally, I'd like to have the ability to set up a magazine with an optional list of users or sites which posts to the magazine would get published to (and which would be whitelisted for accepting posts/replies from). Adding a new user/site to the list would give that new users access to all the previous posts to the magazine as well. Removing a user/site from the list would not allow that user/site to see anything new nor go back after the fact to read.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I realize that having this "list" idea is perhaps a bridge too far, so an alternative would simply to allow a magazine to be marked as "local only" -- meaning that the magazine would not accept messages from other instances, nor would it publish content from this magazine to other instances.