Its great, every day more and more people are creating content and the quality of discussions is rich and contextual in most cases, back in reddit most of the times a huge chunk of the top comments where just reddit comedians making a low effort comment to try and gain upvotes.
One of the things I like about lemmy the most so far is the ability to view both a local All and the All with every instance there is, so if my local instance gets stale I can just look at whats happening on all instances!
I tried using them for a while but they only got in the way more than they were useful for me, and since I don't really find myself constantly talking to anyone I turned them off to save myself the headache.
Maybe they're useful to people who constantly text each other, but for me? I'll just stick to the notification quick reply if its urgent.