Yes, they are all public. This is the option that is marked:
(x) “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers”.
I’ve also discovered that timezone settings are wrong in a lot of the blogs. I have told the blogs admins to set them properly, and now I will wait and see if that solves this mystery (might be that BuddyPress checks time in a certain way to decide to show stuff in the activity stream or not).
btw, thanks for asking. I felt alone in here. Good to know someone reads my questions
Now I see that the default post (Hello World!) for all the blogs in the network are not visible in the activity stream. Could it be that when they all start posting new posts they will appear in the activity stream?