@die4ever@retrolemmy.com said:

Lemmy communities are kinda hidden in the small World icon

I mean, yes and no. Forum administrators can put them on the front page. Users can't, though, because, well, forums aren't content aggregators, and the UX is expected to be different. On my NodeBB forum, I put all of the relevant Lemmy/PieFed communities on the front page, so they're accessible to anyone visiting the forum. They look like first class sub-forums, and users can treat them as such.

The thing is, I can't treat them as such, because I am not a moderator of those communities, so there are some jurisdictional issues with this, and they could potentially be a significant issue because making them look like first-class sub-forums that I, as the admin, have no direct authority over can be confusing to my forum's users. I'm taking a significant risk putting them in the same index with my locally hosted and managed categories.

I certainly don't want to have that risk imposed on me by having users be able to make off-site communities look just like local categories on their own, even if only they can see them as such, because the visual language that they are engaging in still implies and reinforced that I am taking responsibility for what goes on in those spaces, and that they are, in fact, first-class spaces on my forum, when they are not.