You’re not. If we wanted algorithms, we could go back to Reddit or Facebook.

Every time a social media site has offered, pleaded, cajoled or forced me to take a non-chronological timeline, I've refused. And if that refusal eventually becomes impossible (no option, addons no longer work, etc), I take my eyeballs elsewhere.

You're not an edge case. :)

Exactly why I stopped using Facebook because it was damned near impossible to have a chronological timeline on the app.

But you aren't anyway because the post that go into it depend on the people you follow. If you have an transparent algorithm that you like it doesn't change anything about that. It might just be a more enyoable experience if you choose your algorithm right.

Agree.

Even on sites with an algorithm (eg Reddit and Twitter) my experience was severely improved by trimming down the follow list and then always sorting by new.

Most people dont have an account for a single subject though. I could follow some software engineer and his posts about FOSS are going to have the same priority as his ramblings about politics or proper way to boil an egg.

I my experience so far, I need to follow hashtags to find people, but then eventually follow people to make a feed that isn't covered in crap... But even then the actual news get overshadowed by just random thoughts or replies thst are of no interest to me and discovery again becomes an issue.

And every time it's brought up people come up with a different solution; oh no you have to follow hashtags, oh no you have to follow people, oh no follow everything, but also curate and filter extensively, also multiple accounts, ugh. Tbh Id rather have an algorithm at this point.

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

lemmy uses

Does it?

Probably because there exists a bit of a rift in the technical term 'algorithm' and how it's commonly used in discourse. Technically it describes both:

1. An open-source algorithm that assigns a simple score based on votes, score and age, where two users subscribing to the same communities will always have the same result.
2. A hidden algorithm that's based on an unknown amount of invisible variables, many of which are based on user-tracking, and tries to maximize time-spent at all costs.

While OP (hopefully) intended the former, most people immediately think of the latter when the term is used. Personally I'd like to see an implementation of the former as well, as a simple way to get up speed on the most important things that happened over night for example, before switching back to chronological timeline.

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/...

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.

My experience on Mastodon was never really satisfying. Most of what I see are post with one or mostly zero engagements from other peopel and that's just boring.

Are they labeled this way in other social media networks?