I just realized you're on the sh.itjust.works instance, which was defederated from Beehaw so that also doesn't help.
Reference: https://beehaw.org/post/567170
If you don't find something that works for you, you could always try doing a hand wired board. They're pretty fun and easy to do.
Maybe it's the communities you're subscribed to. Personally, my front page is pretty filled. Take a look at https://lemmyverse.net/ to see communities from other instances.
Private trackers are great since people tend to seed things for longer, also to note generally keeping your ratio up is required. Personally, I use a private tracker when I need to find something I just can't find anywhere else, but with that said for anime nyaa should be the only place you really need.
In the winter, I'll accept 23C anything colder and I catch a cold.
Are you on an Apple product, since that could be related to the “iCloud’s Private Relay” issue, since you're getting a 502 error?
I think a lot of the major topics have already been covered, but without knowing exactly what you're looking for, it's kind of hard to comment. If, as you've said, the communities you're looking at are dead, then maybe start posting in them and see what happens. If nothing happens, then possibly the right people just aren't interested right now, although I'm sure people will come along eventually. I would say it's fair to say a large majority of people aren't aware of Lemmy or don't know how to use it, so it'll take some time.
I wonder if someone has already created a bot that asks chat-GPT to create a piece of code, grabs it to try and run it, and then just goes back and forth with chat-GPT to fix the errors. Now the code would probably be a complete mess, but I wonder if non-coders could use it to create helpful one-off tools they can't find anywhere else.
Considering it's a front-end, I'm surprised there are no screenshots of what it actually looks like on their readme.