It irked me too, when I started using itch. I am used to seeing a private message system on a platform that sports a community forum. Also you can "follow" any user, but it does not do much, except if the followed account publishes games (or makes public reviews and collections. those would appear in your feed)
Also there is no public review system for games, like seen on Steam. You see rating summary, but cannot read what people were writing for a specific game. Not even how the distribution of ratings is. There is a difference between a 4 star game that often gets 4 stars and a game that gets lots of 5 stars and some 1 stars.