How does Lemmy's front page work?

Here's the documentation.

When browsing the frontpage or a community, you can choose between the following sort types for posts:

• Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time
• Hot: Like active, but uses time when the post was published
• New: Shows most recent posts first
• Old: Shows oldest posts first
• Most Comments: Shows posts with highest number of comments first
• New Comments: Bumps posts to the top when they receive a new reply analogous to the sorting of traditional forums
• Top Day: Highest scoring posts during the last 24 hours
• Top Week: Highest scoring posts during the last 7 days
• Top Month: Highest scoring posts during the last 30 days
• Top Year: Highest scoring posts during the last 12 months
• Top All Time: Highest scoring posts during all time

From what I can gather, "hot" is somewhat recent posts that are being upvoted, and "active" are posts, regardless of age, which are currently generating a lot of interaction, whether upvotes or comments.

I’m also curious about how it works with a mix of subscribed communities. When I sort my subscribed comments, Hot seems similar (identical?) to New. Active does give me interesting stuff, but hides things I’d be interested in from smaller communities.

I’d like a mix that gives me those more popular posts I’m interested in, but also gives me the less active posts from smaller communities.

You’d need some way of calculating a scaled score of each post in each separate community, then providing a method of sorting all posts using that scaled score. That is, some way to realize a post in a 100 member community with 25 upvotes and 200 comments may be more relevant in a subscriber list compared to a post with 200 upvotes and 100 comments in a community of 10,000.

Of course, I’m not sure I’d want the same scoring mechanism used in all as opposed to subscribed. I want to see the niche but interesting stuff in my subscribed communities. I’m not sure I want that when looking at all, or at least not to the same extent.

First, I wish they had a top hourly. Second, I hate hate hate site wide pinned posts.

Lemmy instances, listen to me do not use site wide pinned posts! I can understand a once in a long time fundraiser post getting pinned. But keep your pinned posts off my homepage please!