It's not like reddit is any better about fracturing. There's two different San Diego subreddits because the mods hate each other. There are plenty of other examples but they are rarely talked about.

Here in the documentation it explains what the sort modes do. Active considers the time of the latest comment, and hot considers when the post was published instead.

I like Geometric Weather from F-Droid. I just tried force closing it on airplane mode and it showed the same info after the close.