Thanks for sharing your question here, this indicates to me that the label text we use for these sorting options is not very easy to understand. They might sound a bit similar when you first read it.

For community categories, we offer two different types of default sorting:

Default: sorting by latest activity

Here content is listed by the latest topic or reply published.

News: sorting by latest published topic

In this category content is sorted only by newest topic published.

You can find this setting in the Control environment under [Platform] - [Community] when you edit or create a category.

The purpose of having a different sorting option is to enable you to have an official channel where it is important to see the latest publications first, rather than which content had the latest comments.

I might consider renaming the "newest first” label on our community to "latest articles” to make this a bit more explicit for visitors.

Thanks @Julian - that makes sense! Is there a reason InSided focused on “newest article” instead of “newest post, in general”? For example, it might be useful to sort by new topics within a community category in case they are “drowned” by a few more active topics. 

We actually do also offer this way of sorting content for community categories as well. Users can select this in the menu of a category list. It is just that this is not the default sorting for this type of category.

We believe that having such a sorting as the default in a regular community category might have a negative effect on new activity in older topics by not being visible to many users. Here it is usually more important to be aware of these new comments compared to a news category.

Hope this answers your question?