I think most projects pride themselves on not having something like that. It would be hard to create an algorithm that doesn't create the problems that we know of commercial platforms (echo chambers, biases, and the likes). There used to be simpler algorithms on the platforms but then people got stuck in racist or conspiracy stuff. And then they tried to tweak it and then people started to complain that the platforms are biased. You can't win. It maybe harder to curate what to follow on your own but at least there is not some algorithm that influences what you see and what you like and what you think.
How about give the users control over the algorithm? Akin to Lemmy, where we can at least choose one of many sorting algorithms, including chronological. But I only use 'New' when checking out specific communities. For the actual feed, I very much prefer an algorithmic approach.
I don't see it as the platform's responsibility to "create an unbiased recommendation algorithm without creating echo chambers". Give me the means to prevent that, yes. But please let me decide for myself wether I want a wide or narrow range of topics, and which flavor.
What do recommendations look like for you? Because platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. don't just recommend based on what all people like but they recommend based on what is trending in your realm of interests. That means that they create a profile of you. Even if you could create something similar to that without being invasive it's still very vulnerable towards people gaming the system. Big companies like Google or Facebook try to tweak their algorithms constantly so that they don't get exploited and they still don't always succeed. An algorithm makes the whole system much more vulnerable towards things like disinformation, conspiracy theories and the likes.
@blue_berry Friendica does have both a chronological feed (that can be sorted by creation date of the post, the date that the post arrived at the system or the date that thread was changed the last time) and also some algorithmic feeds (called "channel") that displays posts of their followers based on some rules. Also there are channels with posts of all kind that are discussed a lot in the last times. Another channel shows content from people that are followed by the people that I follow. Other ones are language based, etc.
This is a brand new feature and will be part of the upcoming release. Of course the plan is that the user can tweak the rules.
Define "curate" and "exciting"? How would you want them sorted?
I mean, there's sorting by "hot" which takes comments and votes into account, but beyond that I'd very much prefer all the algorithm fuckery to stay well clear of the fediverse, because it inevitably leads to everything going to shit. It invites "gaming the system", and before you know it your entire feed is full of ads, bots and iNfLuEnCeRs.
I'd also be interested in this but where you could toggle which feed you wanted. I don't think personalization would be possible by user because that requires excessive tracking and would not be welcomed but maybe there's another way to do it with boosts or other counts.