Reddit made it impossible to have long-term discussions like forums do. Posts would just fade into irrelevance after a day or so, whereas with forums new comments would bump the thread.
Lemmy has a sorting option just like forums:
“New Comments: Bumps posts to the top when they receive a new reply analogous to the sorting of traditional forums”
And Lemmy also has the “Active” sorting method, which says:
“Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time”
so Active seems like a compromise between Hot like Reddit and the way forums do it by New Comments
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
yea it’ll be interesting to find the midway point for Active to be properly in between Hot and New Comments
but I think it’ll take time to tune it, especially because right now we’re getting a big wave of users and content
it also depends what you want though, if you check regularly then maybe you want to sort by Hot, but a more casual user might be better off with Active sorting