I'm using Jerboa, I don't know if it is an app thing or a lack of content thing, but when sorting things by "hot" I only see old posts, should I only see things by new?
It's a Lemmy thing, not just on jerboa. I just sort by "top day" to see the top posts from the past 24 hours. Once I've seen most of those, I switch to new all, which keeps a decent amount of new content coming through.
The platform is still young, so it's a combo of a) not enough content yet and b) early sorting algorithms that paradoxically haven't caught up with the influx of users yet.
Hot and active are currently broken and will show stale content. It's a Lemmy thing not a Jerboa thing. I'm hoping they fix this in the upcoming version that's in testing right now.
There's currently a bug with "hot" and "active" where old posts remain at the top. I don't remember the details but it's getting fixed in v.0.18 (which is already in release candidate 4).
There are two solutions until the fix is released:
get your server admin to reboot the server everyone in a while. This seems to temporarily refresh the content.
use "new" or "top day". That's what I've been doing.
Sort by All->New or Subscribed->New, depending on how many communities you are following. Keep in mind though that Lemmy is still much smaller than Reddit at the moment but it's getting better by the day.
I sorted by New.
The "Hot" feature may not work as the reddit "Hot/current", as there wouldn't be an advanced algorithm.
Lemmy is pretty small, so it somewhat works.
But if it starts to get very big, there will have to be an algorithm to manage the proposed posts, or it will be unusable.
I'm seeing clumps from the same community/magazine all grouped together when sorted by "active"
My best guess is that the data is transferred across instances in chunks and I'm seeing the content in those chunks! It's far from a deal breaker but there's definitely room for improvement!
This right here, after going through communities and setting up my feed how I wanted it, I immediately messed with profile settings to get the display I wanted. It already feels like a better Reddit frontpage.