I feel like this is what happened when you’d see posts with hundreds / thousands of upvotes but had only 20-ish comments.

Nah it’s the same here in Lemmy. It’s because the algorithm only accounts for votes and not for user engagement.

I find Reddit more useful because of all the data it has than because of the new posts. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

It would be helpful if there were an instance that migrated all of this to Lemmy so that we could access it from any other instance, instead of having to download it for local browsing.

it would be useful to contribute to the docs if you think there is something that needs a better explanation