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?
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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