That's coming, in case you didn't know...
But, as far as Hive Communities Design tells us, there will be a catch.
You have to decide what kind of a Hive community you want from the beginning. Once you decide, there will unlikely be a way to change your mind or change it at a later date, because the type of your community will be hard-coded in the name of the community owner account.
Until now we have only seen in action one type of communities, the one referred to as "topics" in the communities design. And we have 548 of them at the time of writing this! Not sure if they are all functional though, because if you attempt to create an owner account with a proper hive id username but outside the Hive communities interface, you end up with a regular account on Steem, unlinked to the Hive communities.
In the topic communities, anyone can post and comment, including non-members (i.e. guests).
But the design speaks of two other types of communities:
- journal - only members can post, but guests can comment
- council - only members can post or comment
Here's a relevant quote:
All communities and posts are viewable and readable by all, and there is a governance mechanism which can affect visibility and prioritization of content for the purpose of decreasing noise and increasing positive interactions (however a community wishes to define it) and discourse. By default, communities are open for all to post and comment ("topics"). However, an organization may create a restricted community ("journal") for official updates: only members of the organization would be able to post updates, but anyone can comment. Alternatively, a professional group or local community ("council") may choose to limit all posting and commenting to approved members (perhaps those they verify independently).
So far the Steemit wallet interface only allows someone to create topic communities, even if you don't know it.
There's no way around it on the Steemit interface or on the blockchain to create other types of communities until they are supported by the communities interface(s), because the Hive communities are part blockchain (owner account + other community accounts, posts, votes, comments), and part centralized database and Hivemind/communities code.
Just in case you are not convinced, I tested it:
I created outside of Hive communities (i.e. outside the steemit beta interface) the Steem account hive-21112, which should correspond to a journal-type community. But it was created outside the Hive communities, and the Hive code doesn't know it because there aren't any Hive database entries corresponding to it. So, if I try to check out the "community" later in the beta interface, it tells me it's an "unmoderated tag" as you can see above.
I've read there are community managers who would be interested to switch guest posting (maybe guest commenting too) on and off through the admin interface. By looking at the communities design this seems an unlikely option. And I don't believe it would be easy to redesign this, maybe that's the reason why the other two types haven't been released yet, in case the need for a a more flexible solution is under consideration.