Is this sort of thing inevitable? The fact we feel compelled to bring algorithmic content sorting into the fediverse says something about the way we use social media. The author mentions that reverse-chronological timelines make you feel like you need to spend hours scrolling through much of the same thing to make sure you’re not falling behind on the internet. The other side of that is, why is it that we’re all spending so much time dumping the same thing into each other’s timelines? (I’m at least a little aware that I’m probably the nth person you’ve seen posting about this or a similar problem in the last week)
My solution to the timeline getting too fast has always been to unfollow/mute people, but maybe that’s getting impractical.
I think this is a valid point to remember as well as the fact that the main implementation allows users to control visibility of certain type of posts, hide/show replies, hide/show boosts, etc. These are all user-based tweaks to the reverse chrono algorithm. Algorithms aren’t bad if the user is in control.