The fediverse is basically a giant chat room. The main thing this is better for is engagement; you're replying to people who are online right now, so they'll likely reply back. The downside is that it's prone to manipulation, and people might not see important posts.
If it can be done well I'm all for it. Lord knows I don't want to sift through every post to find something engaging. I just haven't seen it work yet, except arguably Reddit (you get good things there, depending on the board, but you end up missing a lot too.)
Then you have the counting problem, servers don't accurately count... well, *anything* from other sites. The success of a given algorithm will vastly change depending on the site.
It really seems like a hill not worth climbing until there's an infrastructure that properly supports it, at least. Manual curation in the vein of Misskey's various timeline options is a better way to go, I think.
So much is left to the user it's hard not to see whatever you want, however you want it, assuming you take the time to configure, which is the biggest barrier. It usually takes me about an hour to make everything comf with a new setup. Downgrading to a lower resolution laptop changed everything
@alex
Step 1. Take everything from a big network that is naturally categorized and jam it into a linear feed.
Step 2. Build a super mega skynet AI that can sort the world in ascending order.
Hmmm... how about instead accept mortality and just don't do the step 1. Every "good" instance should have enough moderation to detect a spammer (or any other type of bot that is not properly announced) within itself. Users should be allowed to conveniently browse instances and follow them. No, you will not see everything that is "most important", such is life, deal with it.
I don't think the algorithms(tm) in the centralized networks were devised as a user convenience feature even if advertised as such. It's likely tools that arose naturally to cut costs and mitigate damages without having to hire and organize many 10s of thousands of people across the globe just as full-time moderators.
