I do a lot of browsing with “New”, and noticed that @fedia.io posts are always at the top of the list.

Upon closer reflection, these posts are stating “2 hours from now” or “30 minutes from now”, meaning the software likely believes these posts to be from the future, and thus puts them on the top of the “New” list.

In the long term, this could serve as a mean to “game” the “New” list and put your posts on top of it. I’m not sure how Lemmy software should handle this (we “trust” federated servers after all with various metrics, such as post time).

In the short term, it just means that fedia.io posts will basically be permanently on the top of “New” lists (given the 2 to 3 hours of misconfiguration, any post from fedia.io will be on the top of new until they’re “old” enough to be from “right now”). But in the long term, it means that misconfigured servers can purposefully shove data to the top of “New”. In either case, “New” doesn’t work the way we want it too.