I’ve subscribed to a plethora of communities that really interest me and actually have posts and discussions in them, but I have to go to the specific community to see this. My “Subscribed” feed only contains a few of the same posts that I’ve seen for weeks in Hot, the same posts from even longer ago in “Active”, posts from the same communities as the ones in “Hot” in New and no other communities, and pretty much only posts from the Meme’s community I unsubscribed from when sorted by “All”. I also see a majority of posts barely have upvotes or comments on them at all from the “bigger” communities. Is this just the growing pains of this site? Am I still doing lemmy wrong? Is it the instance I’ve chosen to join?
It’s a bit of both. No, the place isn’t empty, but it’s still not populated enough for content to aggregate as well as it does on Reddit.
Content aggregates based on how the users vote. The more votes there are, the more data the algorithm has to work with, the better it can sort content.
Think of it like a waterwheel. On Reddit, the water comes in like Niagra, that wheel can power a city. Here, it’s like modestly sized, gentle river so you’ve got less to work with.
Simultaneously, the waterwheel here is still somewhat under construction, whereas Reddit’s has been a well oiled machine for many years now.
In both cases, time will fix it. Just need a little patience.