The front page of Lemmy is mostly posts from 2-4 days ago. I can see people getting bored/not bothering to check back if it's always the same posts on the default sort.
There is a bug in 0.17.4 that stops front pages from updating shortly after the server is restarted, thus resulting in “hot” and "active" showing stale posts.
I have fixed this issue on https://lemm.ee already, you can check our front page to see fresh posts. The fix will soon land in the main Lemmy codebase as well so other instances can take advantage, you can track the issue here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3076
I have also advised other instance admins that regularly restarting their Lemmy server will work as a band-aid workaround until the proper fix is released, so some admins have already implemented this in order to get their post rankings working again, but the proper fix will come in the next release of Lemmy.
There are two maintainers, but it's open source, so dozens of others have contributed over the years (and a lot of new contributors have joined in the current month - myself included!)
I poked around to see which bugs are being worked on and whatnot on lemmy-ui's github, but I couldn't find the release schedule (new to open source projects like this).
Is there a way to get a sense of when a new version drop will be applied outside of being an actual contributor or is that all hidden/just in the minds of the maintainers?
AFAIK there is no release schedule as such, it's more a situation of it'll be released no sooner or later than when it's ready for release 😃
I know it can be frustrating to hear that as a user, but it really is better than promising a release date, and then either failing to deliver on time, or delivering something which you know is not really ready.
I know it can be frustrating to hear that as a user
Not at all. I get it completely. I do some programming for my 9-5 and have our releases and stuff scheduled in our Jira, but that's a private dev team, not a open source project like this and it doesn't use github/gitlab for anything.
Expectation management and getting people to understand why we didn't deploy at the specified time is a huge annoyance, lol.
that regularly restarting their Lemmy server will work as a band-aid workaround
This will cause another problem. The outbound federation queue is held in RAM only, and restarting lemmy_server will cause it to forget to send copies of comments and postings to other instances when it has not yet finished delivery. see issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2142