Why Is The "Explore" Tab Empty On Smaller Instances

I've had a small mastodon instance for over a year and recently decided to get to the bottom of why the "Explore" tab hardly ever recommended any posts.

When I was a programmer I never used ruby, but reading through the code I think it's down to a hard threshold of 5 minimum interactions for something to even be considered for the trending algorithm. This makes it hard to meet theses conditions on instances with a small number of active users.