My understanding so far after a couple days is that joining a community gets it to show up on your front page but has no effect on it displaying under topics.
In topics these are pre-built groups of communities (like multireddits). You can’t modify them.
Feeds are custom groups (like a multireddit) you can make that are just like topics except under your control. You can manage what communities are in the feed and show up under each category. You can create a feed that shows up as a “sub-feed” just like in topics. If you join a public feed it is like a user made topic where you can’t change which communities show up in the feed.
Am I understanding these correctly?
You can also copy a public Feed to make it your own, if you want to amend it.
There’s some overlap between Topics and instance-wide Feeds. Hopefully, Topics can be removed one day, so instances will just have Feeds - some instance-wide (created by the admin), and some public (created by users). This will make things less confusing. Topics are currently used for new-user onboarding though. There may also be other reasons for a reluctance to remove them, I’m not sure.
As a new user I latched onto the topics pretty quick and used it for navigating around. I will say despite the confusion the experience here is 10x better than on the lemmy instance I created an account on. I will work on Feeds over time as I navigate around and see content I like.
Don’t you DARE remove 1 of the most clarifying & elegant navigation-systems from PieFed, 1 of the main reasons I want to be running an instance!
Don’t look at it if you don’t want to…
but do NOT remove it from the lives of us who want it being central to instance-navigation, please!
: p
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If you start your own instance, you’ll find that Topics have to be all manually created by you, whereas Instance-level Feeds can be copied from other sites to help you bootstrap what you want your navigation structure to be. The idea would be, that if Feeds can completely replicate the functionality and convenience of Topics, then neither admins or users would notice or mind if Topics were removed.
It’s not something to worry about though - I was just thinking aloud about possibilities, not announcing my plans.
Understood & appreciated, but feeds cannot substitute-for the Table of Contents of This Instance,
which is what the Topics page gives everybody.
Feeds are made, shaped, formed, they do not represent the actual-current-structure of the information on the instance, if you see what I mean: therefore they cannot substitute for Topics, the ToC of the instance…
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