Something that trips me up a bit about federation and instances is the overlap of identical communities from different instances.

So for example, I’m an atheist, but it’s be years since that was a part of my identity that moved me to care about atheist memes or patting myself on the back for not being religious, which (sorry guys), is what I feel like happens in those communities. So I get them out of my feed by blocking them the way I block plenty of other communities I’m not interested in. In Apollo I was spoiled by the ‘hide subreddit’ feature that I don’t believe existed in Reddit itself, but which was crucial to my enjoyment of that particular app. But since there are multiple instances hosting a version of any given community, I must’ve blocked at least three ‘atheist’ and two or three ‘atheistmemes’ communities, which look the same to me, but are hosted on different instances.

Is my All feed destined to continue having different instance versions of all the topics I don’t want to see, no matter how many times I block them, as long as there are more and more instances hosting those communities? I don’t want to sound unimpressed by this new technology or ungrateful for the amazing service you all are building, but this feels like either a pretty big flaw in the federated user experience or a pretty big gap in my knowledge of how to work the platform. I’m entirely receptive to the idea I may just be doing something wrong.

Just curious. Thank you for everything you do.