Welcome! The first few days have some extra learning, but you'll find that lots of people have mostly or entirely replaced Reddit here. My thoughts:
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Set your sort to 'scaled'. I find that this gives me a nice mix of posts from large and small communities. I don't quite remember which sorting option it was, but early on I was also dealing with an unchanging feed and the culprit was the sorting option.
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keep an eye out for other communities you're interested in. There are fewer users on any particular community here, but its less of an issue if you subscribe to more places. [email protected] for example, you can subscribe to it to passively find out about other communities
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Yes local is supposed to show posts from your home instance's communities only. I don't have much use for it, but it can be useful on topic focussed instances.