alt Hacker News"most liked" won't work. has to be chronological, and manually curated. the way fediverse works. when you make an account somewhere, you can choose to see the local people, or the entire network, but it's all chronological.
There's things like hashtag searches and whatnot, but none of it is algorithms; in the sense we understand it to mean, here, these are not manipulative algorithms designed to keep people on a site and keep ads rolling by.
on the fediverse, there are bots to curate content such as "most liked", one can subscribe to these bots to see such "views" of the feed.
there's absolutely no reason for any of that crap to be built in, other than that's how reddit (and HN) do it.
There's a "trending" feed on nearly every implementation including the official Mastodon one (hashtags have their own "trending" too), and chronological definitely fits "an algorithm" imo - it has all the hallmark problems of one, such as encouraging bad behavior (frequent spamming is the most effective strategy to be seen). Lemmy is even further down this path, with "hot", "controversial", "active", etc, and defaults to "algorithmic" sorts for its front page and all comments.
Fediverse absolutely has "algorithms". People generally want them. I agree that it's broadly less user-hostile (I'm very much a fan), but it's very much moving down the same paths as twitter (mastodon), reddit (lemmy), etc.