I think that’s the rub if you’re coming from a centralized -thing- and move to federated: nobody’s doing any work for you (except, you know, hosting and developing).

There’s no real incentive to “capture your engagement” since nobody’s making money off of you. This was something I’ve seen a lot of new people on Mastodon struggling with – without “the algorithm” to do the legwork, users are left to do a little bit of heavy lifting and curate their own feed.

(To be fair, /r/all used to be a hot mess on reddit as well before it was as big as it got)

Right now your best bet is to hit the front page of your Lemmy instance, click “ALL” (instead of local / subscribed) and filter by New. This will give you a real messy look at what communities are active, and let you start subscribing to to the communities that appeal to you.