Yeah, I feel like Lemmy is easier to get started with due to the more community-centric nature

Yep, Mastodon takes some effort to get going. You need to find people who are interesting for you yourself, in order to seed your feed with interesting stuff. And it goes much smoother if you also interact yourself, which is where many lurkers, used to Twitter and its algorithm feeding them content, hit a wall. It's just a completely different world in there.