For over two years, Pixelfed’s development of federated groups has continued to take shape. The feature evolved from a simple subscription relay into a fully realized community tool. Groups is fully fleshed-out, and will ship with moderation tools, user permissions, spam detection, and more.

Permissions and moderation have been key concerns for Groups development, which historically has been a problem area for this kind of feature. Pixelfed’s development lead hopes to make a lasting impression on the rest of the network. Public demonstrations, while brief, have illustrated how roles and permissions are being brought together to build a better experience.

Group creation is simple and straightforward. There are three different group types: Public, Private, and Local. It also looks like admins will be able to import their old groups from existing servers.

The biggest, most significant reveal at this stage of development is that Pixelfed’s groups feature will be launching with compatibility for both Lemmy and Kbin, officially connecting Pixelfed to the rest of the “threadiverse” that the other two platforms occupy. Together, all three projects may be able to convince the rest of the Fediverse to build something compatible.

The Long Effort to Bring Groups to the Fediverse

Developers may be getting close to developing a standardized cross-platform group communication feature. It could transform the network.

It’s hard not to overstate this, but Groups is a feature that’s been a long time coming. Dansup took his time to get this feature exactly right. Even though it took two years to get here, the whole thing looks incredible.his is an update the community has been looking forward to for years. The code has been merged, now it just has to get put into an official release.

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