Disclaimer: I cannot into code and I don't even have a test environment set up.
How would people feel about a feature which hides communities from the front page for users who are not subscribed to them? I think it would work something like this:
-Instance admins have a "hidden community" list
-Instances can be flagged hidden as well
-Communities can flag themselves to he hidden on local, or all external instances (which would only work for instances which respect these flags)
This would give instance admins a little power to curate what new users are seeing without having to defederate. It would also allow communities to be a little more insular and avoid traffic from the front page if they wish to do so. I think it would be good for circumstances where:
-Instance operators want maximum comparability without actively promoting stuff they dont like (EG lemmygrad, right or left politics, weird porn)
-New users who turn on NSFW aren't shocked by gore, weird porn, or other things on the front page. (See for example, the post asking to defed from burggit)
-The site can just more easily host communities which don't get along with each other
The downside would be that some admins might not like "hidden" communities growing under their nose, or communities might feel like they're "soft banned". But overall I think it is worthwhile. A lot of sites which host both normal and weird porn force users to opt in manually to see the weird stuff, for example, and this keeps criticism away from front page users. I think being required to see stuff you don't want to see, and then manually opt out of it, is too much for some users. It could also help keep down stuff that will be used to criticize lemmy in general.
In effect, it should be similar to the ability to hide NSFW, but more granular without demanding a complicated tag system.
I do not think this would be difficult to implement. I'm excited to see Lemmy grow, I might even start from zero and try to learn enough to add features. But, how do people feel about this feature? Would you want to be available, and use it if it was?