FYI sort by "Top Day" if you're tired of seeing the same top posts from 2-3 days ago
Not sure what's happening with the ranking algorithm, but it seems like the default main page is still displaying the same set of popular posts from a few days ago.
But if you switch to sorting by "Top Day," it'll show fresh popular posts from the past day.
There's a bug with the hot sorting algorithm. Basically the process that handles sorting the feed will crash after a few hours. (At least, that's what I've been told is the issue)
Your server admin can restart the lemmy process every once in a while as a bandaid until next update.
Should be with the 0.18 update, which is a pretty big one that will fix some other things too. I don't think it will be that long but I don't want to go in the admin group chat going "wen release" I know how annoying that is especially for a volunteer project.
I'm glad to hear the issue with the Hot algorithm is a bug, but the Active feed seems to be almost completely static as well and has been that way for a while. It's been all the same old posts basically the entire time I've been on Lemmy. Hot was the escape hatch for me until it stopped working as well, but I feel something needs to be adjusted with Active too in addition to fixing Hot. Especially since Active is the default.