Oh, that option seems to have escaped me! Thank you!

My experience is "active" is weighted with too long a time horizon and is mostly worthless to me. A single thread with 100 responses will shoot to the top of "active" even if no one has posted for 2 days.

The nice balance I've found is "scaled" which seems to weight recency of posts and not so much on the quantity. I've set my Lemmy preference to default to "scaled".

"New" is also fine, but that sorting will likely only have low engagement because the posts are so new.

There's "Sort by New" which only considered post time, and there's a separate "Sort by New Comments" which considers the time the last comment was posted (and also the original post time, unfortunately).

Oh, that would explain the behavior, but would also reflect some poor naming if posts count as comments.

Edit: Yup. That's what it is.