Smaller communities never appear in “hot”

My lemmy.world front page defaults to “subscribed > hot,” which should give me a mix of trending content from my subscribed communities.

However, I’ve recently noticed that it really only shows posts from a handful of the larger communities I’ve subscribed to (mainly technology and news).

I thought that most of my smaller niche communities had probably dried up, but when I visit directly, I can see that they do have recent posts, but none of these rose to “hot” on my front page.

Lemmy’s algorithm should be smart enough to diversify the front page with rising content from all of my subscribed communities, even if some of them top off at 10 upvotes.

Thank you for your consideration.