I find the “explore” page super useful for exploration! Spend a few minutes twice a day or so and the content quality is quite high, great place to branch out into boosts from. On my instance, I also do my best to curate the global feed to be somewhat useful (though things to creep in at the edges, I need to do some culling now for some Misskey bridges that are pretty loud in that feed).
I think that’s newer, no? Or at least slower to adopt by 3rd party apps. I don’t remember that being a thing 8 months ago.
added in March of last year, and not sure about third party apps since I use the official interface. I find it very useful though, between that, hashtags, public lists of people to follow, and boosts, I set my feed up in about 6 hours and it’s been on minimal-maintenance-mode since and serving me fine. depends on how much the niche communities you like adopt the Fediverse too, YMMV!