It would be nice to not have to sift through so much chaff to find wheat
Isn't that the nature of social networks, though xD
it should be up to the user to decide what they see for the most part. At least, they should be able to decide what they don't see.
You can always turn off federation by going into your Kbin sidebar and clicking on the little triangle icon, next to the settings.
Or you can go to https://kbin.social/sub, to view the equivalent of your Reddit home page (i.e. with the communities you're subscribed to). https://kbin.social/ is more like r/all, where you'll see stuff from your subscriptions, plus other random stuff.