I did. It had great simplicity without ads, and would sync with all my devices. When I heard it was shutting down I was bummed, but Antennapod with gpodder for syncing is great.

Parallel to the join-lemmy.org documentation (see below) I upvote what I want to see more of, and downvote what I want to see less of.

"You can upvote posts that you like so that more users will see them. Or downvote posts so that they are less likely to be seen." ~ https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

This.

(Throwing my two cents in: remembering to breath in such situations seems to help alleviate the anxiety of how you might unintentionally come across, and help you appear less intense— seemingly less likely to been seen as a threat)

Ah, I suppose I can be a bit more specific about my process.

Posts: upvote if I care/liked it, downvote if I don't care about the post so I will hopefully see more of what I care about, and less of what I could careless about.

Comments: upvote those that add value, and really only downvote those that specifically subtract value (mostly when people are being jerks)

Yeah, using gpodder.net had sporadic functionality for me. I ended up self hosting my own gpodder server, using the fantastic micro gpodder server project. Highly recommend.