Sorting by new comments gives posts with no comments! Pretty big annoyance for me tbh.

A lot of the discussion around sorting specifics makes me wonder if a plugin-like system for user created sorting algorithms would be useful.

It could allow you to curate your own feed in a way, based on age, activity, filters, basically any post metadata. The algorithms could be shared or maybe even federated through lemmy itself. I have a suspicion this would be closer to "neat" than "worth it" though. This is really just a brain dump of a random idea.

Something feels wrong but I normally just browsed "best" on reddit and that was a curated list of top subs. So it's weird to me to sort Lemmy by "Hot" and get a ton of posts from random communities with no upvotes or replies. Which they are obviously not HOT as no one has engaged with them except the OP.

I feel like something is "off" with the way it is curating things.

So far hot has worked pretty well for me. Haven't really ran into the issues you mentioned with posts not having that many interactions near the top of hot, unless it's from a smaller community. My main problem I've had is when opening Lemmy after a bit or refreshing I'll get the same posts over again even if they're marked as read which is annoying and usually means I end up sorting by new. Would be nice if there was an option to hide already read posts. (Or if there already is one I'd be very interested in knowing where it is, also I use Jerboa mainly on Android so not sure if that changes anything either.)

I have the same issue, would love to engage more but sorted feed is either same through out day or bloated

I definitely agree that some things need some more time decay. This place is bumpin' no reason the top 5 posts should be lingering on my front page for a day. According to their documentation, if I remember right, time is like a multiplier that increases the "gravity" to cause it to fall down the page. But if a post from a couple days ago had 1000 upvotes because it was the first thing everyone saw when they got here and everything else has like 50, it doesn't need much of a multiplier to stay at the top. We may have broke it....

I've actually blocked a couple communities because they were the top like 10 posts of my feed for days. New content was buried.

Running a personal selfhosted instance. Subscribed to a lot of communities, however Hot still shows me posts from a year ago? It’s weird to say the least. Personally I am switching Active, Hot, and Top Day to keep up with things