Some of my favorite communities that are fun and active are:

• !bicycles@lemmy.ca
• !cyberpunk@lemmy.villa-straylight.social
• !foss@beehaw.org
• !games@sh.itjust.works
• !linux_gaming@lemmy.ml
• !steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
• !technology@lemmy.world

r/RedditAlternatives is another one that might be worth mentioning instances on.

I recommend Waistline if you use Android. It's on F-Droid.

The barcode scanner uses a community run database (Open Food Facts) for nutrition facts so you might find that you need to manually input items or correct outdated info more often than compared to the more popular My Fitness Pal. Obviously that gets easier once you build up a collection of your usual foods in the app.

Not enough people know about that very useful website. Although I think that Lemmy should have this kind of complete search as a native feature without needing to go to a third party website.

Yes, posting and interacting is essential to help our communities grow. I used to only lurk but have been trying to post more on here.

A big sore spot is that youtube videos and text posts can’t open in-line on the front page.

I see a book icon under posts that does this when browsing through my instance's website. Most of the mobile apps are early in development and may not have this feature yet though.