If you find your X feed is fucked, bluesky is right there and offers complete algorithm customization… the network effects aren’t as strong but at least there’s some options to better control the experience.
A forum like HN is much more of a town square because pretty much everyone sees the same content in every set of comments, with just one toggle ("showdead") to modify that.
One scenario where chronology is confusing is when a reply to an earlier tweet takes its chronological place in the timeline but also includes the earlier tweet for context.
If you are following 0 people, the "Following" feed acts similar to the "Discover" feed. As soon as you follow a single person, it works as you'd expect (only showing content from people you've followed).
Are you maybe seeing things that have been reposted by people you follow? There's a lot of that, but those still count as "posts from people you follow". If you want to exclude those, there are settings at the following link:
https://bsky.app/settings/following-feed
Also if you just want to not see them sometimes, there's a feed you can add called 'OnlyPosts':
And that only-posts feed is even stranger. It only shows 3 days. People I follow have months of posts.