This is what Twitter used to be - I would log in, scroll down until I had seen all updates since I last checked and then left the app. This was, however, before you got tweets in your feed from people you don’t follow (outside of retweets)

Works just fine on Mastodon for me - I've got the people who I follow and I see all their posts in chronolgical order. There's also the federated which flows past swiftly and is quite fun to dip a net into when something interesting drifts past.

That's why you only follow specific people, and there's also a couple of tools left to tweak the timeline further (e.g. very useful: disable retweets from specific 'noisy' peeps).

Only if you follow way too many accounts.

Check out Mastodons federated feed, it’s a mess but fun place.

Wow, you must be young. This is how the internet used to be, and people liked it.

If you follow thousands of people then maybe. But in that case you're going to miss tweets anyway, so if you've got way too many tweets buffered and you want to see more recent stuff you can opt to skip them.

You could/can get this with Twitter lists, and it's actually way better than anything else.

Is that the point?

Then again if that is indeed the point, just follow fewer accounts.

is that so different from the current system? Besides, its highly dependant on how many people you follow, and whether you care about seeing every tweet from every single one of them