Lemmy actually has two different “trending” feeds. Active, which seems to show posts that are getting more comments, and Hot, which seems more focused on votes. You probably have Active selected by default. Turns out porn gets lots of upvotes but doesn’t generate a lot of conversation.

Maybe you’re on lemmy.ml or one of the other instances defederated from lemmynsfw where most of it is from 🤷

What ‘my friends’ have done is make an acct on lemmynsfw and one on ml, the apps allow you you to swap between accounts in 2 button presses. (Jeroba for me). So I have porn mode and doom scrolling mode.