There are only feeds for Subscribed, Local and All. Things can only show up there is they fall under one of those categories. Then the secondary filter determines the order. New is going to be chronological, Hot is some formula of votes per hour, active is some formula of comments per hour, old is probably reverse chronologically. etc…
It won’t ever factor in what you visit and engage with on its own.
There is currently no engagement-based individual curation on Lemmy. The two most commonly used ranking algorithms (Hot & Top) are based strictly on votes. Top sorts by the total number of votes from within a given time window while Hot considers all votes against a steep time-based curve.
Not coincidentally, this is the same algorithm methodology used by Reddit. Two Reddit users subscribed to the exact same communities will see the exact same Hot/Top feeds, regardless of how much or little they individually engage with specific posts. Lemmy intentionally copied this community-based engagement methodology, presumably because it’s part of the secret sauce that makes Reddit-like platforms special.
That was true at one point, but reddit has had personalized rankings for a while now. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/7hkvjn/what_we_think_about_when_we_think_about_ranking
But your point stands; reddit’s earlier ranking methodology was obviously pretty good since it made the site so popular.
