TLDR: 3 people working together can gatekeep content on the “active” and “hot” feeds on smaller servers/communities.
After some playing around, I noticed posts disappear after reaching a threshold. A quick search later and I’m in the Lemmy docs reading about how this all works.
In plain English, any three people working together (or one person with three accounts) can stop posts from appearing on the default feed. Once a post reaches -2 it will only appear to people who browse “new.” Edit: Of course, it reappears after it climbs above -2, but it’s a race against the clock.
As a smaller server, we’re vulnerable to this. But we also have some extra mitigations - namely, @seahorse@midwest.social has to approve everyone who joins, and that might weed out bad actors.
So what can you do? Upvote content liberally, downvote sparingly.
That’s the beauty of this kind of system though. beehaw can setup their server however they want, if you don’t like how they have things set up don’t use their local, you can either choose to interact with it through other federated instances or not.