I've been harping on about this for a while on the fediverse ... private/closed/non-open spaces really ought to be thought about more. Fortunately, lemmy core devs are implementing local only and private communities (local only is already done IIRC).

Yes they introduce their own problems with discovery and gating etc. But now that the internet's "you're the product" stakes have gone beyond what could have been construed as a reasonably transaction, "my attention on an ad ... for a service", to "my mind's products to be aggregated into an energy sucking job replacing AI ... for a service" ... well it's time to normalise closing that door on opportunistic tech capitalists.