I don’t think v0.18.0 changed much regarding moderation tools. The blocking of communities was limited to the account level in v0.17.4

I don’t even know what that is. But it seems like you might benefit from reading the Beehaw sidebars.

It’s funny that you view IRC as the superior user experience because I’ve always just tolerated it as I don’t like it much at all. I prefer Matrix over IRC from a UX view. I never really used XMPP so I don’t know where that fits. Signal beats them both and is the only one I’ve convinced others to use on an individual basis. I’ve never tried an open group on signal though. People seem to prefer both Telegram and WhatsApp to all of the above. UI preference seems to be favoring WhatsApp in the general population.

I’ve set my default view to subscribed bet there’s a lot of communities I simply don’t care about in the local instance and I want to see communities I’ve subscribed to on other instances.

I started a food focused community at https://lemmy.world/c/culinary

Do a search for that URL in Beehaw to subscribe.

You might want to check out https://beehaw.org/communities

List of Beehaw communities

Copy the link to Nature and Gardening and paste into the search on infosec.pub to subscribe from your existing account.

Isn’t it possible to mine that data by running a node on the fediverse?