Bluesky is ushering in a pick-your-own algorithm era of social media

I really dont understand why we cannot just go back to chronological as a default. This is how I use X/Twitter, and anything else that lets me just go chronological.

Chronological is ideal for personal feeds -- family and friends, maybe some professionals and curators you follow, your preferred brands, your local public services, maybe keyword/topic subscriptions, etc. A few hundred or a few thousand explicit subscriptions with output sized to match how often you check your feeds and how much you care about missing things when you don't.

Like maybe you, that's all I want, so it feels like chronological should just be the default option that all this algorithm and trending business is nonsense. I just want a nice aggregation of the information I know I want from the sources I personally know, appreciate, and can contextualize.

But "at scale" you end up with a lot of users who are more interested in idle discovery, seeing what their peers are seeing so they can talk about it, etc -- as well as platform maintainers hearing the siren call of advertising and paid placement as way to offset the high costs of maintaining a multimedia network for millions upon millions of users. Together, this becomes the wind behind algorithmic feeds and paid visibility features, because the algorithmic feeds are something users actually enjoy and breaking away from chronological feeds opens tons of revenue opportunities in an expensive and intensely competitive business.

I no longer expect to find my kind of service from any platform that's positioned for the global mainstream. The winds are always going to take that somewhere else, even if it looks promising today.