@ericjmorey That sounds like the situation with Lemmy, but with less features.
@Cougar I'm already familiar with kbin and I know they have that feature, but I think the platform is still in beta, so IDK if it's ready for serious usage or not.
@DJDarren Lemmy communities seem to be treated like users on the Mastodon side of things, so you can just input @ username @ domain (minus the spaces) into Mastodon's search bar and follow them like normal. The posts then get boosted into my feed where I can reply to them like any other Mastodon post. There does seem to be a warm-up period if you happen to be the first person on your Mastodon instance to follow a community, but once that's done I've found the interop to be reliable.
@noodlejetski For all the new people coming in, a fun thing about the Fediverse is that you can actually grab content from more platforms than just Lemmy if you feel so inclined. I, for instance, am commenting on this thread from Mastodon. I subscribe to users on PixelFed (decentralized Instagram + Flickr), Mastodon (decentralized Twitter kind of), Calckey (like Mastodon but with a different feature set), and Lemmy of course. So just keep in mind that that if you find yourself wanting more types of content, unlike silo'd corporate social media, you do have the option to explore the rest of the Fediverse ecosystem and have the content there show up in your feed. Mastodon alone has like 2.1 million monthly active users.
@ericjmorey What I'm suggesting is that
"My biggest concern with kbin is its in alpha, very little time in use to smooth things out, there's more likely to be major changes to its functionality, possibly breaking changes."
is also something that applies to Lemmy, so I'm not sure why you'd knock one platform for it but not the other.
And even if you're not particularly interested in following non-Lemmy users, others are and it would resolve an interop asymmetry that has formed due to lacking this functionality. Like, the only reason we can have this conversation in the first place is because Mastodon supports following Lemmy users and communities and allows me to interact with them, but it's not currently possible to follow non-Lemmy users on Lemmy, which makes the interop very one-sided and cuts you guys off from a large chunk of content (unless you make accounts on other platforms, but Fediverse platforms shouldn't require that just to subscribe to public content feeds, as the interop is one of the Fediverse's biggest selling points over silo'd corporate social media).