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.

You mentioned wanting a curated feed, and none of the responses so far addressed that part. One thing you can do is go through the community lists like Lemmy Explorer and subscribe to the communities you’re interested in. Then instead of selecting All, you can use Subscribed. I did that and it seems to work reasonably well. I do also check All sometimes to see if there are any new communities with content I’m interested in.

Selecting All Instances and then Top Day will give you the highest upvotes for all 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.

edit- grammar