Without that level control over my feed, I'll probably go back to the other place. I thought self-determination is part of the fediverse mission, but so far that is much easier on reddit. Is that feature in planning for any of the major hubs (kbin/lemmy/beehaw)?
You're more likely to see it in a third-party interface. The list of fixes and features the developers are working on is long and there are more fundamental issues to address first. It's also a volunteer effort with essentially two people doing the work.
That’s how I believe federation works. So everything I’m subscribed to with my user on my instance is pulled in and kept in sync. If the origin instance of the community goes down, everything that was synced up to that point still exists on my instance and I can read it.
Instances have filters in the admin settings, but for a user level filter there isn't one yet. The devs are overwhelmed trying to get some key performance stuff out, but I can't see them turning down a feature patch if you want to write it and create a pull request.