I love that you get the reference in my username LOL
I am subbed to all the crochet magazines/communities that are federated with kbin, but now that I've replied to someone else it dawns on me that the real issue is that those communities participate via the microblog and not via threads. This is probably a major reason why I'm not seeing those communities as active.
I wonder if there isn't a way to get microblog content to appear on my front page along with new threads.