This has been an issue since the beginning of Kbin tmk, but when you make a post, it won’t appear under sort by hot unless it has an upvote. This means that if someone forgets to upvote their own post, it just won’t appear on the default sort. There are plenty of posts I’ve missed because of this.
Any idea when something like this might be changed?
The “sort by hot” algorithm was probably designed with a larger user base in mind, but I agree with you. For small communities in particular (and the vast majority of Fediverse communities are still tiny) I think even posts with no upvotes (ie no self-upvotes) should be included in the “sort by hot” view. For larger communities, where the threshold for “new” and “hot” may be set higher, so it doesn’t matter so much. (I don’t know what the algorithm is, but it might be something like ‘hot is defined as getting a minimum of X votes, where X scales with the size or activity intensity of the community’.)