You gotta follow some people, and also hashtags. Following hashtags made a huge difference populating my feed. There’s no algorithm so you get to/have to choose what you want to see.

I also use the ice cubes app for mastodon, which has a trending option also for when I want to see what’s gaining traction outside of my follows.

Since it’s browser-based, do you have a setting that auto refreshes your cookies, or are you using a privacy mode browser?

As a former Apollo user, using wefwef for lemmy has made adoption so easy. 10/10, it’s basically an Apollo clone in-browser and has been working great. https://wefwef.app/