[Communities] Add support to remove communities from the left side bar

[alexjba]

Description

As a heavy user, the left side bar can get crowded with unwanted communities and I'd like to be able to remove them from the UI. Currently there's no option to at least hide the communities.

This task could have two different tracks. Either one or both together would make the UX better:

1. Adding the option to hide a community from the UI. Could still be accessible in the community settings.
2. Adding the option to completely remove a community even if the user is the owner.

Acceptance Criteria

• [ ] The user has the option to hide and/or delete a community
• [ ] The removed community is not shown in the left side bar

[alexjba]

Probably completely removing a community from the DB is tricky, but we could still get some quick gains by implementing the hide option.

CC @jrainville

[jrainville]

In theory, this could be a UI issue. The backend work already exists. If we unhide the "leave community" button, even the owner can leave a community. It won't delete from the DB, but we rarely do hard deletes.

The only reason why it's hidden right now is to make sure users don't leave a community as an owner and leave it orphaned.

I have no problem adding a setting in developer options to show it. Though it was a design decision at first to hide the button.

[caybro]

In theory, this could be a UI issue. The backend work already exists. If we unhide the "leave community" button, even the owner can leave a community. It won't delete from the DB, but we rarely do hard deletes.

The only reason why it's hidden right now is to make sure users don't leave a community as an owner and leave it orphaned.

That option is disabled for owners (e.g. CommunitiesListPanel.qml):

StatusAction {
  id: leaveMenuItem
  ...
  enabled: !listItem.isOwner
  ...

and hopefully in other places; so what's the reason for hiding it completely?

[jrainville]

so what's the reason for hiding it completely?

Like I said, it's a design decision to make sure owners don't leave a community and leave it orphaned. The button should in theory be available if the owner transfers the ownership to someone else.

I'm in favor of having a setting to enable the button for advanced users (us).

The is no technical limitations. I've done it in the past already.

[alexjba]

Maybe a compromise would be to add a hide community option as a local setting. The community would still be available in the community settings and the unhide could be available there.

It's probably not an issue for most users while the create community option is hidden, but IMO it would be nice to have this once we enable the community creation.

CC @benjthayer @John-44

[benjthayer]

Maybe a compromise would be to add a hide community option as a local setting. The community would still be available in the community settings and the unhide could be available there.

It's probably not an issue for most users while the create community option is hidden, but IMO it would be nice to have this once we enable the community creation.

CC @benjthayer @John-44

We do have flows for hiding a community the user is spectating here: https://www.figma.com/design/qHfFm7C9LwtXpfdbxssCK3/Kuba%E2%8E%9CDesktop---Communities?node-id=31451-561251&t=wPI2v1QnKbAHLnrn-4

As @jrainville mentioned, we don't allow the user to leave/hide if they are the Community Owner currently. Once they transfer community ownership and the new recipient of the Owner token has set up their device as the control node, we should allow the previous owner to leave the community.

Do we feel it is important to allow the user to choose between hiding or leaving a community? If I'm not interested in the community to the extent I want to remove the community from the sidebar, perhaps I would just leave the community.

Perhaps combining the ability to hide spectated communities and reorder and group communities as Discord does would be sufficient?

[jrainville]

I think what we can do is if Debug is enabled, we show the option for owners to leave a community. Or maybe add a new Developer feature setting to enable it. As far as I can understand, mostly us devs have this issue of having too many communities, so it would be mostly a setting for us.