TLDR: 3 people working together can gatekeep content on the "active" and "hot" feeds on smaller servers/communities.
After some playing around, I noticed posts disappear after reaching a threshold. A quick search later and I'm in the Lemmy docs reading about how this all works.
In plain English, any three people working together (or one person with three accounts) can stop posts from appearing on the default feed. Once a post reaches -2 it will only appear to people who browse "new." Edit: Of course, it reappears after it climbs above -2, but it's a race against the clock.
As a smaller server, we're vulnerable to this. But we also have some extra mitigations - namely, @seahorse@midwest.social has to approve everyone who joins, and that might weed out bad actors.
So what can you do? Upvote content liberally, downvote sparingly.
What I dislike about this is that people who might have something interesting to say or discuss would be discouraged from posting altogether because of the effort involved in carefully crafting their "tone and phrasing" . Like we could still have a report function so a moderator can identify and take down obviously inflammatory -9000-type posts, right? I think people tend to back into their shells when they see their post (which could very possibly already be well thought-out) downvoted to shit for no other reason than the 'monkey-see monkey-do' downvote behavior. In the long run, it seems like it leads to stagnation. I've seen it happen on some of my favorite subreddits as they get more popular and sadly echo chambered. Just my opinion tho.