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 actually find myself wondering this a lot. Mastodon doesn’t allow people to add comments to things they’re reposting, so you’re left guessing as to why they elected to insert something from an unfamiliar account into your timeline.
Mastodon is also short on tools for discovering interesting new posts and accounts that aren’t already on your radar. In this regard I agree that it’s behind the times. Threads handles this much better, giving you a classic chronological feed of people you’re following plus an algorithmic feed that shows you things that are popular with people like you.
But I don’t want anyone to make assumptions about “people like me”. Those kinds of services are always ways off.
At best I could do with a feed from followers of my follows. But repost kinda does that already.
A comment to reposts would be nice though.
And it could do with an automated language filter. Because I’m getting a lot of German in my feed, would rather not.
Misskey translations coming in to save the day!