I think that outcome has strong up- and down-sides.
In one sense, it allows someone to consume a collection of different-focused communities grouped around a topic, and allows each community to specialize better within it’s “own” scope.
The flip side of that though is if that is excessive frontloaded as a default experience, or a recommended one, you wind up in a situation where none of those sub-communities matter as something unique to themselves. They’re all just relatively interchangeable sources of content for the multi-magazine clustered around a topic.
When multireddits first launched and there was big enthusiasm for them on Reddit, there was a specific user who was forever trying to put together collections of spinoff “high quality” subs and package them as this sort of “true old-school reddit experience” - but what that resulted in was huge numbers of discussion subs becoming generically similar, because that one user was pushing the entire collective as this big homogenous “better reddit” experience and users entering the space via the multireddit engaged with the listing in that exact fashion. Then when those subs’ own communities got fed up with the newcomers and went and created their own space, Our Helpful Friend would add the new community to their list.
Moderating in that space was incredibly frustrating, because both newcomers and the user spearheading this were diametrically opposed to the need for moderation - despite wanting an experience IMO is only available in highly moderated spaces, they all firmly believed that the community style they wanted was possible without moderation, if everyone just worked together and played nice. So you tell someone that their post doesn’t meet standards, and they get upset that standards apply to them, cite the rules in some other community, or from Our Helpful Friend’s values statement, or whatever they were using - not understanding that we had not signed on to their project and unwilling to respect that we have our own rules and would not be changing them.
So yeah. Both great feature and annoying feature, and I do vaguely worry that the prevalence of parallel and overlap communities across the Fediverse does risk that multi-mag function doing a little community erasure if it’s not implemented carefully and gracefully.
I think that outcome has strong up- and down-sides.
In one sense, it allows someone to consume a collection of different-focused communities grouped around a topic, and allows each community to specialize better within it’s “own” scope.
The flip side of that though is if that is excessive frontloaded as a default experience, or a recommended one, you wind up in a situation where none of those sub-communities matter as something unique to themselves. They’re all just relatively interchangeable sources of content for the multi-magazine clustered around a topic.
When multireddits first launched and there was big enthusiasm for them on Reddit, there was a specific user who was forever trying to put together collections of spinoff “high quality” subs and package them as this sort of “true old-school reddit experience” - but what that resulted in was huge numbers of discussion subs becoming generically similar, because that one user was pushing the entire collective as this big homogenous “better reddit” experience and users entering the space via the multireddit engaged with the listing in that exact fashion. Then when those subs’ own communities got fed up with the newcomers and went and created their own space, Our Helpful Friend would add the new community to their list.
Moderating in that space was incredibly frustrating, because both newcomers and the user spearheading this were diametrically opposed to the need for moderation - despite wanting an experience IMO is only available in highly moderated spaces, they all firmly believed that the community style they wanted was possible without moderation, if everyone just worked together and played nice. So you tell someone that their post doesn’t meet standards, and they get upset that standards apply to them, cite the rules in some other community, or from Our Helpful Friend’s values statement, or whatever they were using - not understanding that we had not signed on to their project and unwilling to respect that we have our own rules and would not be changing them.
So yeah. Both great feature and annoying feature, and I do vaguely worry that the prevalence of parallel and overlap communities across the Fediverse does risk that multi-mag function doing a little community erasure if it’s not implemented carefully and gracefully.