"Lemmings" seems to be the consensus, and the primary differences in my experience are:

• Higher average quality of discussion; fewer trolls and bad-faith or dumb comments, although not 0
• Less users, so less niche communities

I think these are related; if we blindly wish for more users, we may attract the bad faith posters from Reddit and other more popular sites and make things worse. To improve Lemmy, we want to attract genuine people with niche interests (like you, I hope!). For now, I would learn to appreciate the smaller community, and think of any friends you could invite who would enjoy it here. No need to try to overtake Reddit, lest we become like them.

If you find communities you do like, you can subscribe to them and visit a feed of only your subscribed communities, or visit All to find new stuff. If you find your feed keeps showing you posts you've already seen, there's a setting to hide viewed posts. Keep an eye out for common usernames-- some of us post often enough that you'll see us around! You can also check the instance that people are from (after the @ in their username; for you, lemmy.ca). Some instances are more generalist (eg. lemmy.world, lemmy.ca), while others (eg. lemmy.ml, db0) will have policies or a culture that encourages more specific types of users to join that instance. This info can be useful.

And most importantly, don't be afraid to post! Posting is typically much easier here (fewer rules, no auto-rejecting, no global karma to use as a requirement) and we have fewer posts so it's almost always appreciated.