On Reddit, Reddit would randomly pick 50/100 communities from which it fills your home feed. Your other subscriptions do not matter until Reddit decides to refresh the list of subs its pulling from.
In theory, if you’re subscribed to a bunch of inactive subreddits, your home feed is potentially being held back by these (since, as opposed to Reddit grabbing posts from 50 active communities, it’s only grabbing posts from - say - 30 active communities with the remaining 20 being inactive and taking up the spot of your other active subscriptions).
On Lemmy, is there any downside to retaining subscriptions to inactive communities?
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: There is no algorithm on Lemmy or Fediverse generally. The (edit:
localsubscribed) feed pulls from all communities you’re subscribed to. All sort options (new, active) don’t boost any community over any other*, so abandoned communities should have no effect on what you see in your feed - they simple won’t contribute to it, if you’re viewing recent content.The exception is the “scaled” sort option, which boosts smaller communities, I believe
Small correction: The subscribed feed pulls from all communities you’re subscribed to.
The local feed shows all posts from communities on your local instance, no matter if you’re subscribed to them or not.
Ty!
Scaled seems to favor newer content, so inactive communities won’t show up because there isn’t anything new to show. Scaled works better for low activity communities since they will show up when something does come up.