First of all, welcome! Here's some tips I found to be helpful.

1. Browse by 'all' to find new communities. If you find a post you like there, check out the community and subscribe to it. It's worth taking a look first to see how active it is too.

2. Once you have subscribed to some communities, I find your homepage is a better experience for every day browsing, since it's catered to you. Try sorting by 'hot' to get newer posts. Toward the end of the day, I like switching to 'top today'.

3. Don't expect the fediverse to be the perfect Reddit replacement. Not as many people use it, and there are unfortunately fewer niche communities than there are subreddits. That said, it's really what you make it. If you decide to stick around, make an effort to post yourself. It's something I'm still working on myself, but every bit helps!

I actually prefer Lemmy to Reddit now, because it's bloated with less bullshit, and I find the people (outside of a few communities) to be far more open-minded and less confrontational. Anyway, I hope you like it here!

Could you explain your username? What’s Up_dog?

I’m still learning; but there are allot of wonderful places here. The trick is building a home page. I recommend occasionally looking at all for interesting communities

Read community sidebars and check out the join-lemmy link in the lower right corner of the page.

Use https://lemmyverse.net/communities to find communities to sub to.

Set your expectations. It's not Reddit (for better and worse). Reddit has subreddits for nearly every hobby you can think of. On here, you might be lucky to find a few that match your interests. But they might also be desert wastelands.

I have faith in time this will change.

It's been maybe 2.5 years since I left Reddit. I can't imagine what it's like now.

My favorite view is to be on "local" and sort by "today: last 12 hours".

After reddit shut their API the creator of the app I use changed over to Lemmy. I kept the app and let go of reddit.

Mini tips for navigation.

Type ![communityname] to have your instance look up communities by that name across all instances.

Type @[username] to have your instance look up users by that name across all instances.

If you hit the preview button after clicking on the username or community you'd like to go to, you can then click the generated link to arrive at your chosen community. I rarely navigate any other way. Also good for discovery.

On Reddit I used to keep it set to Top of the last hour. Here it's more sensible to keep it at Top of the last six hours or twelve hours. As with Reddit, filter out what you don't like or don't care about, and subscribe to what you don't want to miss.

Get used to no karma. You'll still be able to see what others think about what your input, but it's not going to stick with you.

There isn't anything to 'learn' about, it's just a reddit-like site w/ a different backend technology.

I would not consider this to be 'blog-like' at all.