The best thing I was told when I was a newbie:
Try sorting “all” by Top: last 6 hours.
It works great for my frequency of use. I then use “hot” if I return within an hour or two. Some mornings, I’ll scroll Top 6 hours for the main stuff and switch to hot for more pressing news while I’m having my coffee.
Those things aren’t strictly related. Lemmy is open source and there are a bunch of apps. There also used to be a bunch of Reddit apps, but Reddit wasn’t open source. The important factor is that the Lemmy software provides an API (application programming interface) which app developers can use to talk to Lemmy instances. API access is free, like it used to be on Reddit.
reddit was open source
Interesting, I was expecting this to be at the beginning not recently, but it seems it was open source up to 2017 - but I’m now realising that 2017 is fast approaching a decade ago so might not count as recently.