I personally have not seen very many Lemmy posts return on Google searches, if at all. It’s not apparent whether or not they are indexed at all, and I would imagine that’s a big vector for new user engagement.
Wow, is that last point true? I guess I misunderstood how federation worked big time. I thought by subscribing to something like “news”, I was supposed to receive all posts and comments to those posts from all whitelisted instances like some kind of syndication. Is that not actually how it works?