I really think the “simple” approach of categorizing bot VS non-bot and federate vs defederate are only masking the underlying problem : all posts do not have the same amount of “value”.

However, with Lemmy they do. And I think this is what’s broken. If you or anyone in the community has time or interest, I think focusing on rewriting the “what’s hot” algorithm would reduce/remove many of these “workarounds” (like the one you’re suggesting).

(I’m just thinking out loud) but a better “what’s hot” would have each post weighted:

1. Against the number of people subscribed to a channel (more subscribers == more relevance)
2. Against the average number of comments by different users/ post / community. (many comments from different users == more relevant) This would implicitly address the issue of bot spam, that you mentioned.
3. An upper limit on new topics / community. This would avoid the meme community from hijacking all of “what’s hot”.

Of course this cannot all be done in real time. Things like “average number of comments per post” could be precalculated daily, but I think it’ll be “good enough” and a radical improvement to what Lemmy currently offers.