Just FYI hot is probably the worst way to browse for news and events, I've found top of 6h is far better if you check often, Active if you check every 24 hrs ish.

That’s mostly on the sorting algorithms being slightly fucky wucky. Lemmy has enough activity to satisfy me, but lacks niche communities.

I've noticed that "Hot" turns the front page over pretty quickly, which means you see more in your feed, but posts are bumped down before the comments start piling up.

Whenever I've posted anything that has made it to the top of Hot, the majority of the comments come in after it has dropped down (which happens after like, 1hr).

If you sort by "active" there should be posts with more comments. The "hot" sorting is not really representative for how active users on lemmy are, since it favours younger posts over older posts with lots of comments. You can read the details of the reasoning here .

Reddit has a lot of international subreddits which don't really exist here on Lemmy (they have like 10 users and they almost never post).

Reddit has huge lively communities. I'm having a ball here on Lemmy, but I too must check Reddit once a day to know if important stuff happened.

Sure, someone could say I should work on jumpstarting these Lemmy communities, but I've only been able to to what I can so far (that is, replying to posts and joining the conversation)

Ninja edit: fixed grammar