Depending on what you're using, but on PC if you go to the menu bars by your username there's an option to filter your feed by different categories including subscribed.

I agree though, would be better to have that in a more noticeable place eventually because it's not super intuitive.

Try out lemmy too. Maybe the UI will fit you better. I made a kbin account too and I actually hope that kbin is the one that catches on, since it supports interaction with mastodon.

That said, I also really miss the subscribed subreddit bar on top of the page like old.reddit.com had.

Same, really. on Reddit, I mostly used the desktop interface so the third party app issue did not affect me directly. Still, Reddit emulating Twitter with the whole effectively killing third-party apps and likely putting everything behind a login-wall, combined with their CEO's tone deaf, smarmy responses... pushed me to jump into the fediverse after contemplating a move for months.

There's a lot of work to be done here, but I like what I am seeing so far. The best thing is that no one entity controls this, so bad actors' impact can be mitigated.