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!
Keep in mind Reddit gets a frillion votes a minute. Votes are the data the algorithm uses to aggregate those pages, and they’ve had years to perfect how it does that.
Here we just don’t have the data yet. “Hot” doesn’t work well because, for all intents and purposes, nothing on the site gets above lukewarm in terms of votes.
Hot shouldn’t be a set number of votes though. It should all be relative so that it can scale with the site. If 100 up votes in an hour would constitute hot today it wouldnt be the same if the active users doubled at some point. So to call anything at best lukewarm now would be incorrect when talking in the fediverse.