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.
“content recommendation is only for stupid people” is a brand new form of gatekeeping that i haven’t heard before!
What I’m actually saying is, that user experience is obviously harder without the algorithms, but algorithms (ML ones) are what brought the internet to this state. So I’d rather live without them wherever that’s viable.