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?
UPDATE I want to thank everyone who posted and gave me helpful advice on this matter. It turns out that there are still lots of people here on Lemmy with me, I just couldn’t see you because I was sorting my feed incorrectly. I’m excited that there are more people here and I’m excited to continue to contribute to Lemmy with you! Thank you all for the help, I really appreciate it. The solutions are to continue to subscribe, contribute to my favorite communities, and sort by top day, 12, and 6 hours. It really helped liven up my feed!
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.