# Federate private categories via ActivityPub
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/federate-private-categories-via-activitypub/308624
**Category:** Feature
**Tags:** activitypub
**Created:** [May 19, 2024, 6:09pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/federate-private-categories-via-activitypub/308624 "2024-05-19T18:09:07Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@thoka](https://meta.discourse.org/u/thoka)
#### Post date: [May 19, 2024, 6:09pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/federate-private-categories-via-activitypub/308624/1 "2024-05-19T18:09:07Z")
A month ago, we (@thoka and @almereyda) tested the bidirectional linking of two Discourse categories via [federation](https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794) and were overwhelmed by how smoothly edits, posts and reactions were synchronized. It almost felt like we were working on the same Discourse. Congratulations @angus 🎉, we owe you a 🍰.
As exciting as this feels for public discussions, we were wondering if federating private categories (for example, through [audience targeting](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#audienceTargeting)) is somewhere on the roadmap?
In our view, the availability of such federated and privacy preserving discoursive infrastructure could be a game changer, enabling a myriad of use cases like shared places for working groups or (paid or unpaid) content subscription models.
Many thanks for this marvelous work.
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### Author:  [@pmusaraj](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pmusaraj)
#### Post date: [May 22, 2024, 5:44pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/federate-private-categories-via-activitypub/308624/2 "2024-05-22T17:44:36Z")
I’m sorry to say that this is currently not on the plugins’ roadmap. The security implications are a little bit complicated and we very much err on the side of privacy/security first, federation by definition leans public vs private.
For the next little while, we want to focus on getting the plugin to a stable state and having it be actively used in a number of instances.
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### Author:  [@almereyda](https://meta.discourse.org/u/almereyda)
#### Post date: [July 7, 2024, 12:44am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/federate-private-categories-via-activitypub/308624/3 "2024-07-07T00:44:35Z")
Thank you for describing your very considerable stance and for sketching this idea against your plans.
I understand the difference in complexity between public and private federation is one of orders of magnitude.