How does Lemmy (Mander in particular) sort "hot" and "active" posts? - Mander

Sorry if this seems like a silly question but I have noticed over the last few months my feed(?) has started to act odd. No matter what I do I don’t see any posts from .world. I checked and mander does not seem to block .world (kinda why I liked this instance) and even weirder is how my feed gets filled with mostly .ml posts with almost no activity no matter how I sort. This did not happen before and got me thinking, I don’t even know how this works across federated instances. Does anyone know: - How does the sorting work on an instance? Is it all the same no matter what instance it is? - Did anything change in the last few months, that would cause all .world (and I assume others) posts to not show? - Other then changing instances what can I do to mitigate the weird slanted results?