On Reddit I generally didn’t read attached articles. I’d developed a pretty good intuition where the article title, website and top comments could tell me all I needed to know (And reading the source normally confirmed this)
On Lemmy the smaller numbers of comments mean we need to engage with the content being discussed more directly, which is quite a nice change of pace for us Reddit converts.
The trick for older, active posts is to start commenting under the top comments instead of making a top level comment yourself. That way, you’re seen by most people who don’t sort comments by new.