Why YSK: Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.World and Sh.itjust.works effectively shadowbanning anyone from those instances. You will not be able to interact with their users or posts.
Edit: A lot of people are asking why Beehaw did this. I want to keep this post informational and not color it with my personal opinion. I am adding a link to the Beehaw announcement if you are interested in reading it, you can form your own views. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
I don’t really like this approach because it’s not personally customizable and wouldn’t be very straightforward. I’d prefer something similar to multireddits where I can make a collection of similar communities.
With the platform at the size that it is currently, I’m inclined to agree with you. But I think in the future, lemmy may become large enough that having a public tagging system would be useful.
Ideally, the two preferences can coexist. The multireddit equivalent would just be a private tag, exclusive to your account. But you could make it public, either anonymously or posted to your account, e.g. tag@[email protected].
Then, all the public tags can be merged at will, so if I make a new account and want to see all communities about birds, I can select the bird tag. If I want to make edits to the tag list without affecting the public tag, I would even have the ability to copy the public tag to my own private tag and prune the communities I don’t like without decreasing their public rankings.
I think this would provide flexible levels of functionality to those who want it, but there may also be hidden consequences of this method that I’m currently missing.