In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).
Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.
I think they mean that fedi didn’t take social media back because it never left. It’s the users who went back.
Like if we all joined Myspace again we wouldn’t say that Myspace rewound social media. People forget that the fediverse has been around a very long time, it’s not new.
Older than Facebook and Twitter?