I set top day subscribed, go through a few new subscribed, go on kbin, set it to hot defederated, hot federated, quickly skim the microblog threads on there, go on lemm.ee, visit hot and active subscribed (they have applied a fix to the active problem on this one that shows days old posts), and then I go through many of the communities I'm subscribed to and go through active, hot, new, etc., and basically see what's up.

I basically mentioned all the sorting methods right? But what's the best one, you ask? Probably kbin by hot local and hot federated. And on Lemmy itself, probably lemm.ee hot. And on this instance, probably new for subscribed and top day for sub, local and all.