I cannot put into words how profoundly stupid this “feature” is. AOL and Geocities pages were genuinely more user friendly. Whoever added it, refreshed the page and said “yeah, this works well” and left it in should be fired! …out of a cannon and into the Sun!
you can subscribe across instances, and just get all of the communities that you’re interested in on the instance you join.
when you browse a community on another instance, there is a message that tells you how to subscribe.