I’ve subscribed to a plethora of communities that really interest me and actually have posts and discussions in them, but I have to go to the specific community to see this. My “Subscribed” feed only contains a few of the same posts that I’ve seen for weeks in Hot, the same posts from even longer ago in “Active”, posts from the same communities as the ones in “Hot” in New and no other communities, and pretty much only posts from the Meme’s community I unsubscribed from when sorted by “All”. I also see a majority of posts barely have upvotes or comments on them at all from the “bigger” communities. Is this just the growing pains of this site? Am I still doing lemmy wrong? Is it the instance I’ve chosen to join?
UPDATE I want to thank everyone who posted and gave me helpful advice on this matter. It turns out that there are still lots of people here on Lemmy with me, I just couldn’t see you because I was sorting my feed incorrectly. I’m excited that there are more people here and I’m excited to continue to contribute to Lemmy with you! Thank you all for the help, I really appreciate it. The solutions are to continue to subscribe, contribute to my favorite communities, and sort by top day, 12, and 6 hours. It really helped liven up my feed!
I have to sort by “New” because “Hot” is almost always broken. I get posts from two years ago :/ If I sort by “New” however, some of the posts are pretty… eh?
It was explained to me last week that the reason it does this is, the algorithm currently checks for interaction and if someone interacts with a 3 year old post it gets put in the pool. If I interact by upvoting the old post because I didn’t see the date, it gets put even more into the hot pool. This happens again and again to make posts come back from the dead. Apparently they’re working on adjusting this.
So, essentially it’s 4chan’s Bump system?
Seems like it, only old posts dont dissapear into the void, they stick around forever.
Hot sorting algorithm is bugged at the moment. Older posts don’t cool down until the server is restarted so they keep popping up. It is currently fixed for the version to be released.
More technical info here and here.