The feed creator needs to know about the communities so they can type/paste the community address in, yeah. This feature takes the expert fediverse landscape knowledge contained in the heads of the terminally online and makes it available to more casual/new users.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Once a community is known to an instance it is available via the search feature. Thus this really doesn't improve discoverability at all assuming the person adding it to the feed is already using the instance.

What it however does is moving the conscious choice of looking for and joining a community to an opaque follow feed button that makes someone subscribe to a lot of communities they know nothing about other than that someone else thought they somehow fit to a single word tag (and it is worse than hashtags on Mastodon as it is not the person making the post that adds them, but a totally unrelated 3rd party).

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 4 hours ago

If I understand correctly that existing feeds can be altered later by the creator, then this is still quite an improvement over the old way that required potentially more limiting admin support. By allowing for such "mods" of not a community but rather of these feeds (again, rather than concentrating the authority solely in the hands of a full admin), it democratizes the process overall. Tbf not very well, but a little bit, and that's not nothing.

And if only a tiny change was made to more easily list out the full set of communities present in a feed (the copy button didn't seem to do that for me, but maybe it could become like a meta-sidebar feature), then it would democratize it still further to allow any user to see what communities are in those feeds - even those lacking a PieFed account, who simply wants to subscribe to those same ones while remaining on their existing Lemmy account?

Anyway, it's a step forward, however small or large, and that's worth acknowledging, woo-hoo! 🥳🎉