Lots of drama, sometimes defederations would make headlines on world news.

Firefish (former calckey) seems to have “trends” and “activity” filters on their platform. Saw that on joinfirefish.org

Never used firefish but perhaps try there?

I feel like I’ve seen way more meme accounts on mastodon rather than on pixelfed, since reboosting works pretty nicely and you have a higher reach. Maybe try mastodon?

AFAIK enabling cloudfare’s anti-DDoS breaks federation quite a bit.

Kbin.social had to enable it during reddit migration to stop the server from crashing due to all the traffic and it made it pointless trying to interact with other instances and fediplatforms.