Created this thread to keep an eye on this feature as I believe it could have a huge impact on communities visibility

Edit: multicommunities / multimagazines would work similar to multireddits: they would be created by users for themselves. Users would be able to make them public if they want to, but the main use case would be private.

The idea is to be able to browse your own “memes feed” and then “news feed” without having all the content mixed in your general Subscription feed

  • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
    7·
    3 months ago

    For Piefed, I couldn’t find any, @rimu@piefed.social is there one I might have missed?

    I know Piefed has topics, but multicommunities or magazines would be more about having personal curated group of communities

    • Rimu@piefed.social
      3·
      3 months ago

      It’s not really on the radar over here. I’d like to democratise the management of topics in some way but what we have now seems to be enough at present. There is not a massive amount of active groups so one admin manually categorising them is still doable.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    41·
    3 months ago

    IMHO this should be opt-in for communities and not left to the users alone.

    The amount of low quality drive-by comments by people not understanding what a community is about and just sorting them in the broadest of categories like “technology” is bad enough as it is (and causes a lot of extra workload for community moderators).

    • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      Opt in for communities to self group as one single feed they can advertise without duplication? Sure.

      Prevent people from being able to group them however they see fit in their own feeds? Definitely not.

        • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          I’m not sure exactly how you’d handle merging comment streams or where you’d direct new comments, so that could be a complicating factor, but I definitely see a lot of overlap of articles.

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      How could it be any worse than what the all feed does? I would presume that if someone has added a community to a “multi” which they then actively view they’re at least generally interested.

      I’m with you on community visibility options in general though. I’d figure that if/when private communities come, expanding that to “visible only to subscribers” would be possible and should then control the problem you raise. Or am I missing something?

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        Yes the all-feed is bad enough as it is, this would make it worse as on the all feed things tend to not stick around that long and get drowned out in the noise.

        As for your suggestion to have “visible for subscribers only” communities. Yes that would be welcome, but obviously “multi” community subscribers are subscribers as well, so that wouldn’t really solve the issue?

        • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          3·
          3 months ago

          A bit late to the party, but my understanding of this feature would be similar to multireddits: defined by users for themselves. Users would be able to make them public if they want to, but the main use case would be private.

          • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            Yes and at the very least the “making them public” should be opt-in for communities as it can cause massive disruptions if these overly simplistic grouping gets popular.

            We have an especially bad example on our instance with the /c/memes community (and previously /c/technology) that is explicitly about Solarpunk memes, yet we get a constant barrage of very low effort and disruptive comments from non-subscribers. This community alone as a result causes most of the moderation necessary on our instance.

            Edit: and on a side note: these kind of shareable groupings make coordinated harassment of minority communities also much easier.

            • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
              2·
              3 months ago

              Interesting, sorry to hear people don’t respect the rules you have for your communities.

              On the other hand, this is already happening without multicommunities, so would that even change that much if they were implemented?

              make coordinated harassment of minority communities also much easier

              Indeed, but it’s not like having a list of links of communities you want to harass is that harder to use compared to a multi community

              • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
                2·
                3 months ago

                I think it would make it worse, and besides, this is a feature that encourages passive consumption, which I find very counterproductive for a small network of sites like Lemmy, which is already struggling to build strong communities with good active participation.

                • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
                  2·
                  3 months ago

                  I think it would make it worse

                  You might be right, maybe we should keep multi private at first

                  this is a feature that encourages passive consumption

                  I’m not so sure about this. In my case (and I know I’m not alone as I read other people doing the same in the issues discussions), I currently have a few alts depending on my mood

                  • one for general topics
                  • one for casual topics
                  • one for tech topics
                  • one for memes

                  It’s a bit cumbersome to handle, so being able to have those different feeds in the same account would be nice. Not so sure about it impacting participation, as it seems that people using alts at the moment are regular posters

        • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          3 months ago

          Interesting. I think it depends in the implementation. I can’t recall how they worked over on Reddit, but there’s no reason for that to be followed here.

          For me, it’s make them like lists on mastodon. Basically multiple sets of singular subscriptions that each user can define as they like. Not super communities, which if that’s what you’re talking about, yea yuck.

  • WanderingVentra@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    Right now I do this by having multiple accounts on different instances with different themes for their home feed, but I could see why this would be more efficient for a lot of people lol.

    • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      Yeah, that’s one way to do it, but it’s not an option for everyone.

      I interact with tons of posts and post a ton, myself, so having to switch to my “main” account in order to not spread my user history across half a dozen accounts would be a pain.

      Best of both would be nice.

    • Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      That’s what I do too, I find it’s helpful to separate topics by accounts.

      A multi community feature would surely be helpful for some people though.