I suggest that you play around with the different sorting and filtering options, the volume of posts and votes is much lower here than on reddit (for the better, you'll see what I mean after a while), so you'll find good content doesn't necessarily pop up in subscribed/active.
Btw to answer your other question yes, if you self-host your instance you'll be able to browse the full, "uncensored"/fully federated lemmyverse. unless you fuck up the federation setup