The assumption is that centrally managed social media is bad because their algorithm is bad. But actually, they are bad because they are centrally managed and force one algorithm onto you. I’m not even advocating algorithm-by-choice. Even instance-specific algorithms would already work and would make the whole experience much more enjoyable and less boring. And if an instance’s algorithm(s) is too aggressive, it gets defederated. That would result in a much more exciting experience imo. And by the way: what’s the problem with getting old posts back in the timeline if it makes the overall conversation more interesting?
No idea why you’re getting downvoted when lemmy uses an algorithm by default.
Technically sort by top and some by new are algorithms. But that’s not what people talk about when they say algorithm with regards to social media it’s secret sauce engagement based algorithms used to show content.
The active and rising sort options are fairly simple and open source so we know exactly how it works
Okay, so people would then be fine if we add better trending / popular / related-to-your-interests feed to Mastodon? Because based on comments here they exclusively want the chronological feed, regardless of what your definition of algorithm is.
Does it?
Lemmy uses simple filters. It has no memory of what you have looked at and takes nothing into consideration other than the chosen filter at the moment. You can even link directly to the filter because it is part of the url.
https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&page=1&sort=Hot
This is searching for the entire federated space of lemmy.world and sorting by hot. You might argue that “hot” is an algorithm, but it is also only determined by things such as creation date, upvotes and comments. Everyone gets exactly the same view so it isn’t specially curated.