Count one more for the “I find the helpful and engaging onboarding experience of Discourse to be helpless and enraging” camp. (Special greetz to @discobot!) Well, chalk off all that to habits, acquired taste, personal preference, accident, coincidence, or concerted action – either way it’s good to see you on here @sknob@mamot.fr!
To begin with, you can open https://the.socialmusic.network/u/sknob/preferences/interface (link to profile settings is in a surprisingly inaccessible place on desktop) and set Default Home Page to Categories. This gives you a classic categorized forum homepage, more or less. Already had the classic forum experience of “pissing off the admin” over all that, hehe 
The story of that is over here: Improvements to the (sub)categories' pages - #19 by icaria36
@icaria36, I know you’ve had enough of us nasty curmudgeons, but here’s another you might want to be aware of – probably belongs in the Discourse federation plugin developers’ backlog: seems to be impossible to tag a Fedi actor from a post.
Actually it’s a fun one – I hoped that if someone’s username here is the same as on their homeserver, maybe it makes for a cool way to tag someone in both platforms? 
But I don’t seem to be able to tag @sknob who is accessing this thread entirely over Fedi and the blue/green federation icons seem to have misled me about that one.