We are also building a non-algorithmic private social network if anyone's interested: https://waitlist-tx.pages.dev
(Thanks to everyone who have already joined the waitlist and provided feedback)
I wish I could pay for YouTube and other apps and they'd stop cramming their decisions on my feed and instead let _me_ control the experience. At least, let me have reverse-chronological feeds on my home, mute/block channels I don't care about, hide content types and give me more recommendations based on the things I actually like or prefer to consume at that point. I still want to use their apps but almost all of their product leads have decided even paying for something like "Premium" wouldn't entitle a customer to having control over their experience. It's gross.
The only downside is that it's still centralized behind the scenes so you still get the weird algorithm gimmickry inside the content like people superstitiously saying or not saying certain words in the first few minutes, nonsense like "nothing to add, just commenting for the algorithm", that weird tendency to dopily repeat the same sentences around what I guess would be an ad break if I ever saw ads etc. I try to mitigate this by sending money to specific creators, showing that an alternative income source to YouTube could be possible, but of course that's still funneled through Patreon which is another centralized for-profit service that has a vested interest in getting creators to provide membership tiers and value-adds that chip away at their motivation to put out meaningful content that enriches broader society.
I've come to think that centralization is a bigger problem than "the algorithm". I don't remember having these issues anywhere near as much when people shared their stuff independently. To be fair, though, back then most people were doing it as a hobby outside of their day job.
Edit: Raising VC funding is the main cause of enshittification. We don't plan on doing that. It is not gonna cost us that much to run - there are not many non-techies who are ready to quit dooms-scrolling. Techies go for sites like Mastodon. So it will be a small group of people who would find this useful and that's enough. It is something we have always wanted to build and building and maintaining is fun.