I left Lemmy to come here to join the fed not too long ago. I went through the setup and joined a bunch of communities. The most active one I spend reading is Selfhosted. Besides that I’m on my home page using the default “hot” and “subscribe” sorts enabled and I see the same thing all day every other day. I see people say it’s not that active and I know this isn’t Reddit with its volume but it can’t be that inactive here. I’ve tried “hot/new” and “all” just it seems to be a bunch of RSS feeds with no human context or interaction. With I’m doing something wrong or the communities I’ve joined aren’t active enough or both.
Think of an instance as its own separate lemmy: separate users, separate communities, separate rules. Except on Lemmy (or Piefed or Mastadon or any other ActivityPub-federated service), they all talk to each other. It’s like taking a bunch of forums and mashing them up into one big giant one.
It’s kinda like email, except the posts are public.