I have an account on feddit.uk and lemmy.world with almost identical subscriptions.
When I visit the feddit.uk homepage and look at posts from my subscriptions sorted by “hot”, the two posts immediately after the two pinned Feddit UK posts at the top are 6 days old. The behaviour with “active” is similar. Posts shown are quite old, and neither hot nor active.
When I visit the lemmy.world homepage and look at the “hot” posts from my subscriptions, the first 10 are all with the last couple of hours. Active shows posts in the last 24 hours with a healthly number of comments.
Both servers are running 0.17.4
Basically, right now feddit.uk is almost unusable for me due to both hot and active being populated by stale posts. I need to search by “new” to get anything approaching useful - but when I do that there is just too much to sift through.
I think you’re right, but the fact that lemmy.world appears to work and is also on 0.17.4, may imply an additional issue (although I appreciate the problem not occuring there may simply be because it’s not 100% reproducible).
Not sure if it helps but these are the first 4 “hot” posts I can see after the two pinned ones:
Although a day or less old. So that seems to be working as intended for me. I do know “active” is an issue that 1.8 is designed to address. No ideal why lemmy.world doesn’t have those problems.