Is it just me, or is sort by active worse on sh.itjust.works than on other instances? On sh.itjust.works, it gives posts (both local and federated) that are weeks old. If I do the same on lemmy.world, it gives much more relevant posts that are a few hours to around a day old. Maybe there are some server settings that could be tweaked?
It is broken in software. It’s a bug that kills the refresher for the database, so the active posts simply don’t get updated at all. Update coming someday.