In one sense this does nothing that other avenues don’t already.
But I do start to see what you mean. Making communities available not just individually but en mass like this will encourage people to not read the side-bar text of each specific community, to see how e.g. its goals may not be aligned with all the other echo chambers and/or debate clubs present in the Fediverse, and instead start treating all communities within a feed as being equally the same.
A fact which PieFed worsens by not describing well the community name. e.g. you may read “c/Fediverse” - but what is that really? Several clicks away, possibly having to go all the way to the home instance in some cases where the short nickname doesn’t match the longer one (and all the more so if there are spaces within the latter), you may find that it means something like fediverse@lemmy.world - but just reading “c/Fediverse” isn’t enough to be able to tell that apart from some other c/Fediverse somewhere else.
Except you can, by simply clicking the post. Not on the feed page, but in the individual post, at the top you can see the full community name - e.g. this example shows Home -> Topics -> Fediverse -> fediverse@lemmy.world.
And then as you scroll down, you can read the exact side-bar text, with all the explanation, rules, list of moderators, engagement stats, etc., like the one above begins with:
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s (sic) related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
And then further below that, a list of Related communities, which I’m not sure but perhaps those are the ones that define that Topic?
So all the information that I think you were wanting people to have access to is there, not on the Topic/Feed page themselves but rather on the individual posts.
Though you are probably right that it could increase more naive engagement, by people who don’t read things. Still, this is a new feature that was not available before, and when even newer features continue to be added it will get better still, like if a setting could be added by a moderator of a community to indicate a desire for it not to be included in such multi-communities. Although even the latter may want to be not a hard cutoff and rather a double-check label - perhaps an example could be a community welcoming to trans people first and about technology second, so it should not be conjoined into a multi-community for technology feeds, yet it may be fine to combine it along with other trans communities? Also, if a particular user wants to make like 5 feeds for their own personal usage, and they have put in the effort to read about each one individually, then this feature is very useful for such a person. (Edit: this one not for the sake of discoverability, but for utility. Although if the person making these feeds does their job well, and does not inappropriately add communities that don’t want to be added, then it would help others for discoverability too.)
Even while people may also use it naively as well, yes. On the other hand, there are fewer than 300 people that use PieFed (see stats), so the immediate effect likely will not be overwhelming, and there is time to add new features before PieFed becomes more mainstream.
In one sense this does nothing that other avenues don’t already.
But I do start to see what you mean. Making communities available not just individually but en mass like this will encourage people to not read the side-bar text of each specific community, to see how e.g. its goals may not be aligned with all the other echo chambers and/or debate clubs present in the Fediverse, and instead start treating all communities within a feed as being equally the same.
A fact which PieFed worsens by not describing well the community name. e.g. you may read “c/Fediverse” - but what is that really? Several clicks away, possibly having to go all the way to the home instance in some cases where the short nickname doesn’t match the longer one (and all the more so if there are spaces within the latter), you may find that it means something like fediverse@lemmy.world - but just reading “c/Fediverse” isn’t enough to be able to tell that apart from some other c/Fediverse somewhere else.
Except you can, by simply clicking the post. Not on the feed page, but in the individual post, at the top you can see the full community name - e.g. this example shows Home -> Topics -> Fediverse -> fediverse@lemmy.world.
And then as you scroll down, you can read the exact side-bar text, with all the explanation, rules, list of moderators, engagement stats, etc., like the one above begins with:
And then further below that, a list of Related communities, which I’m not sure but perhaps those are the ones that define that Topic?
So all the information that I think you were wanting people to have access to is there, not on the Topic/Feed page themselves but rather on the individual posts.
Though you are probably right that it could increase more naive engagement, by people who don’t read things. Still, this is a new feature that was not available before, and when even newer features continue to be added it will get better still, like if a setting could be added by a moderator of a community to indicate a desire for it not to be included in such multi-communities. Although even the latter may want to be not a hard cutoff and rather a double-check label - perhaps an example could be a community welcoming to trans people first and about technology second, so it should not be conjoined into a multi-community for technology feeds, yet it may be fine to combine it along with other trans communities? Also, if a particular user wants to make like 5 feeds for their own personal usage, and they have put in the effort to read about each one individually, then this feature is very useful for such a person. (Edit: this one not for the sake of discoverability, but for utility. Although if the person making these feeds does their job well, and does not inappropriately add communities that don’t want to be added, then it would help others for discoverability too.)
Even while people may also use it naively as well, yes. On the other hand, there are fewer than 300 people that use PieFed (see stats), so the immediate effect likely will not be overwhelming, and there is time to add new features before PieFed becomes more mainstream.