We have favorite tags, and elsewhere there's been a suggestion to have the opposite, "ignored" tags. Ignored wouldn't necessarily mean completely gone from view, but if questions with tags you're not interested in (and not tags you are interested in) were minimized in some way on the question list -- smaller text, grayed out, etc -- would that make a difference to you?

(I'm not expressing an opinion on whether to merge the communities; I'm just trying to understand whether any technical changes would make a difference.)

Well, at some level I wonder why tags don't suffice for all of our community separation needs. Why have separate Codidact subdomains, or separate categories within subdomains—just tag some questions with Linux, some questions with Cooking, some questions with Software.Code-Reviews, etc. appropriately, and then it's all just tag organization. In that radical world, sure, tags would make a difference.

If not, however, I'm saying that I don't want to be distracted at all by Windows questions, or by the users who congregate around Windows questions. I don't want to feel the sense of ownership when I look at those questions that I feel when I see questions in ‘my’ communities, the drive to vote and clean them up and give appropriate feedback and occasionally even answer. If that can be achieved through the tag system, yes, objection withdrawn—but then I wonder why we bother making separate communities at all.

The same tag can have different meanings in different domains, so if you had one huge Q&A bucket for everything, you'd end up with tags like "apple-computers" vs "apple-fruit" vs "apple-records". And "editing" means something different on Writing than it does on Meta. Probably "annotation" means something different on Software Dev vs Meta vs Writing (annotations in technical doc, for example).

But more importantly, we divide the big bucket up so that communities can form around their interests, and what I'm hearing from you is that your community is Linux and a larger community that includes Windows and phones and other stuff would dilute Linux too much for you, unless we can support (good!) customized views or filters so you can focus on what interests you. Thanks for explaining.