Yea. It'd be nice if only top level posts came through. And then, for comments to come through, you relied only on replies and following particular users.

The issue though, I think, is that mastodon has no backfill mechanism. So there's no way to get a lemmy post in your feed, and then opt in to seeing all of the comments. It's the same thing that leads to "reply-guy" replies on mastodon, where people reply with the same statement because they can't see each other's replies. At some point, I think we have to just start talking about how mastodon is in some ways a bit shit.

Still, I think my suggestion above would be better. Would it be possible for lemmy to adjust its federation for that?

Yes. It completely took over my home timeline doing this.

We desperately need more fine grained control.