I tend to browse all (or whatever it is here; just the main page my app gives me). It’s full with a lot of US political outrage, but the other posts dotted among that have some interesting ones that I’d miss if I just looked at subscriptions.

So I mostly skim down the big line of posts and click in the occasional one that looks interesting.

I imagine you can get into more of being a community if you subscribe to some ‘communities’ (what on Reddit were subreddits).

Feel free to post and comment. People are mostly friendly unless you question the political narrative - and even there we have friendly debaters and some opposing-sides-bigots to balance it out ;-p (mostly the drama between standard Reddit-esque liberal Dems supporters and USSR/PRC communism supporters known as ‘tankies’, mostly over on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad)

There’s fewer of us here, so you’ll see some names come up often, and don’t worry if your comment gets few or no votes, or just one downvote (there seem to be occasional people going round downvoting every comment of users they feel upset with).

You can also block users or communities, to filter out stuff. I tend not to, because even in the most ignore-worthy communities some good things float to the top sometimes. For the same reason some instances block whole other instances. This one, lemme.ee, tends not to block other instances from the server.

To use Lemmy there’s the website obviously, which I think has a couple of interfaces you can choose between, or various apps. I use Jerboa because it was already on F-droid when I started.

And some people have suggestions about sorting by new or top instead of hot. I haven’t played around with that. Lemmy doesn’t have a personal targeting algorithm, so the simple sorting it does have can be a bit more hit and miss.

Does that help a bit?