Social: Although it may be making too much of too little, there is an interesting contrast between the passage where Mormon describes the dismissal of Benjamin’s people, and this dismissal of the Limhites.
Mosiah 6:3
3 And again, it came to pass that when king Benjamin had made an end of all these things, and had consecrated his son Mosiah to be a ruler and a king over his people, and had given him all the charges concerning the kingdom, and also had appointed priests to teach the people, that thereby they might hear and know the commandments of God, and to stir them up in remembrance of the oath which they had made, he dismissed the multitude, and they returned, every one, according to their families, to their own houses.
In both cases, we have the king formally dismissing a public assembly. This is natural, because a formal assembly requires an end, and it is fitting that it should be proclaimed by the king. At the end of each of these passages describing the formal dismissal the people return to their homes. Once again, this is logical, as in an ancient town, many if not most of the people would have lived at some distance outside of the town’s ceremonial center.
Where we have the contrast in this two very parallel dismissals is in the organization to which the people return. For Limhi, they simply return to their individual homes. For Benjamin, they return home “according to their families.” As noted in the discussion of this verse, the kin-based organizations of Mesoamerican societies typically located residences in similar locations, creating family compounds. Thus for Benjamin’s people, return “according to their families, to their own houses” makes imminent sense in a Mesoamerican context. Limhi’s people simply go home.
It is impossible to know whether or not this distinction in the kin-unit description of the two societies is significant or not. Certainly we would expect that kindred would continue to be important for Limhi’s people, but we should also remember that the origins of those people with Zeniff did not necessarily include entire kin groups. The original volunteers probably cut across family boundaries, and the founding peoples would have a less well defined large kin structure. Additionally, the Limhites were people who had been reorganized after the failure of their king and his political/religious structure. This may also have effected the nature of kin organizations by having removed or demoted some of existing kin groups. It is therefore possible that there is a significance in this distinction, and that the Limhites did not have kin-based compounds as part of their residential pattern. They certainly would have had nuclear family units together, and may have begun to create the extended family compounds, but if most of the Zeniffites were of travel/labor age, these larger extended family compounds would be in their infancy rather than well established as they would have been in Zarahemla.