First of all, welcome! Happy to have you onboard.
With regards to the long-term future of Leminal Space, we certainly have no intentions of going anywhere. While the instance should be considered 'hobby-run' in the sense that it is funded personally by the admins and maintained in our free time, I can see this changing in the future if we expand to a point where the server requires more upgrades to stay performant and the ongoing costs consequently increase -- at that point we would consider allowing user donations towards the server costs.
If it plays out that way and we became community-funded, that may be the right time to also reevaluate how the server is administered and maybe even consider user voting on significant decisions. However, at the time of writing, our MAU count has been fairly steady for several months at around 60. So, at this stage, at our current size and rate of growth, moving towards a community-run model isn't on the cards in the immediate future.
As ever, always happy to keep the discussion open going forward.
It looks like the issue you found of missing communities may have been because those communities hadn't been subscribed to by anyone on this instance previously, and were therefore unknown to the instance. There is an automated process that periodically subscribes to top communities on other instances, but newer, niche communities will have to be manually searched for before they begin to federate with this instance, per the Lemmy 'Getting Started' guide:
This also means that content is federated from the point of the first local subscription (it won't pull in older posts unless they're pinned). This is why you're only seeing pinned posts for [email protected] and [email protected] as there have been no new posts in either community for a month or more.
As for posts being marked as 'hidden' for a new user, that's not something I've come across before. Is it happening at all on established communities or only new (to LS) ones? We updated to a new version of Lemmy a couple of days after you joined, so if it was a bug hopefully it has been squashed.
Sorry for not responding sooner - this one flew under my radar.