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.

The difference with Lemmy I feel is that you actually have to try to drive content to the communities you started to grow them, instead of having them heading straight for you just because of the name.

So you have to browse around to find the good stuff, the exploring before everything is settled is the fun part right now.

It would be very interesting (I'm brand new to "federation") if sub-sites that share a name could be aggregated, but who would be allowed to moderate it, and how would unaffiliated subs be disentangled? Maybe this could be an easily accessible user option, and to each their own collection of sub pages?

Also what about slightly different names with the same theme, tech and technology? I'm interested to see what comes of these questions.

Selecting All Instances and then Top Day. This will give you the highest upvotes for a federated instances for 24 hours. I used this to find and subscribe to communities i like.

BUT - Be aware that there is known bug in the current version of lemmy that causes an automatic refresh of new items.