Its decided by the sorting option you choose. It sounds like you want the option called “Top”, though you haven’t said what time range you want, so you might just want to start with “All Time”

There is a weighting applied to the community size. Since we’re smaller a community that’s popular could dominate the feed and smaller communities wouldn’t be seen for pages, which hurt getting the word out about them.

If you prefer if that way it’s still there, check out Hot and Active for things you may be used to, Scaled is the one I’m referring to which most instances have set as their default.

There are different sorting options for both posts and comments. You can set a default and also manually switch between them when you want.

Check out the Lemmy docs on Votes and Ranking for more info on how each works.

most clients allow you to sort posts and comments using different algorithms. what you’re describing is generally referred to as ‘top’, but a lot of clients default to ‘hot’, which i believe focuses more on recent activity rather than overall upvotes. i personally almost always sort by ‘new’, but my client, thunder, also gives options for ‘old’ and ‘controversial’.

edit: and posts also get the option of selecting a time frame for ‘top’, and also get a ‘scaled’, ‘active’ ‘most comments’, and ‘new comments’ sorting options.