I only use it sporadically, but when I do, I often write replies and get replies. I think you need to mutually follow a lot of people before it starts working (like, a thousand or more). I'm not convinced the reply rate is significantly lower than BS or twitter..

Re: your last comment: for sure. To me that's another bonus of fediverse, e.g. since mastodon is at least partially able to interact with Lemmy and other fediverse apps, and that will presumably improve over time, eventually you will be able to do at lot of cross-app interaction from one place.