alt Hacker NewsThere'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.
chronological feed nuisances can be blocked or not followed in the first place. It is absolutely not an algorithm by the definition we're all using here.
It is an algorithm on a data structure, but it is not an algorithm to drive ad impressions.
do you see the difference?
this is why people say "Algo" when talking about the latter, and "Algorithm" when talking with other like-minded people about data structures and algorithms.