What I'd do early on is to check the frontpage for a given instance, where all posts appear, and block what I don't like and subscribe to what I do.

Also, since you're on PieFed, you should have access to microblogging too, meaning you have access to Fedi Bridge, meaning you have access to some contents from Bluesky too. Just need to follow the bot and if needed, allow it to follow back at you: @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy

Also also, you can have your RSS feeds as posts in your timeline through @birb@rss-parrot.net

And there's communities and profiles made specifically for discoverability, like !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and !newcommunities@lemmy.world. !lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com is also a good place to find posts.

As for not getting too involved for a sake of privacy, not much to be done on that front other than just following stuff, preferably with RSS and without liking/commenting to avoid fingerprinting as much as possible.