I agree, the cross-posting gets annoying. Why do people insist that everyone who is interested in a certain topic needs to participate in their post, so it has to go on every community?
People did not do that on reddit. They just made one post and waited for interaction.
It's more that every sub had much different levels of activity so one repost would get attention while another dwindled.
The issue with Lemmy is activity is not centralized so each individual repost sees roughly as much activity as the other, so as far as sorting goes, they're all considered to be as equally active, i.e. "Hot". It's all kind of flat line across communities.
We just need more activity, more people, more voting, making making more posts.
This is the natural effect of the core structure of this platform.
And it's only going to get worse as the user base increases and instances start to defederate one another due to differences in acceptable content and conduct.
I know saying anything the least bit critical of Lemmy means lots of downvotes, but the whole system seems far too prone to fragmentation and the repetition necessary to make up for it.
The whole appeal of Reddit was that it was a one stop shop for key discussion on the topics you were interested in. No matter how many similar communities popped up there was usually one subreddit that was the spot for a topic, and other similar ones were only viable if they focused on a specific niche. Here, it's completely possible that there might be 20 communities on exactly the same subject that have 90% of their content overlapping...and you have to be subscribed to all of them if you want the extra 10% of unique stuff they bring to the table.
The dream was that each instance would bring something different so the collective would be a mosaic of unique(ish) communities
The reality is that each community is an overlapping subset of the communities defined by the social sites like Reddit, going all the way back to Usenet groups