As someone who posts a ton, I've noticed that a lot of people seem to check the top posts once a day or so. Posts can be slow to get engagement and traction, but the ones that become super active still seem to hit similar peaks as before (1-2k upvotes, hundreds of comments).
But yeah, people aren't as actively engaged and commenting on everything all day like they used to on reddit. The framework is here, and I think if there were another big exodus, Lemmy is set up to be a great landing point.
This. Quality over quantity. There are much more walls of text, but it's filled with information and humanity. Reddit just became another Meta platform, but for niches. Lemmy has great communities, but all are tech and anti-big-corpo related, I feel right at home :p, but I understand that most don't.