Hi @niallon11
Did you know the 2017 Roadmap made statements of intention to deploy "community" pages?
We still have no community pages! Just tags and 95% of posts falling through the cracks.
I really hope the developers will deploy communities this year. Facebook has "groups" and Reddit has "subreddits." Why hasn't steemit adopted something similar yet?
Steemit, Busy, D.tube, and co. are nothing more than wallets/blockchain explorers souped up to look like social media sites. They look at Comment objects and render the comment.body attribute as Markdown. They let you perform blockchain operations like post, upvote, etc. But the blockchain viewers have some control over how they display information - ChainBB displays newest posts first always, Steemit hides content that has been flagged enough, etc.
At some point, everyone is going to start realizing that Steemit isn't the only way to interact. For example the witness @netuoso runs his own version of the site at https://condenser.steemliberator.com/ - he often merges in code there that has yet to make it in to the official site.
I hadn't read the roadmap but I was reading posts from some of the original members before the xmas which stated that they were working on communities at the moment. I can't remember which users i was reading at the time but they basically said that their intention going forwards was to create communities similar to subbreddits which will make it much easier to follow content and find people interested in the same areas as yourself.
It was under development at the time but there was no dates stated for when it would be functional.
It should work very well for the site especially as we grow. One of the biggest problems that I have found here is how fast your content disappears from sight unless you have a huge following which most of us don't. Hopefully this will go some way to fixing that as well.