It's different. I wish I had the ability to create a meta-community (or meta-instance) that pulls communities from different instances together into one feed without having to mass-subscribe to all of them.
The fact there are multiple communities of the same or similar interest spread across multiple instances makes it much harder to get a good grasp of actual activity, so it takes more effort to reach a critical mass.
It'll get better with time since Lemmy is still pretty underdeveloped as software.